faggot

You're not a faggot in high school because you had a bad day. It's something you chose to accept and tell your friends and parents and see some people sneer at you.

In my high school, the preferred term was faggot. Homophobia is passe now, but I hope the word "nerd" will serve people who want to stir up hate against us just as well.

You're responding to a guy who previously posted "How does being called a faggot hurt someone who is, in fact, a faggot?" [1].

If you really think the use of fag and faggot reflects homophobia, you need to take a step back and look at where you are - the internet. Do you think that people posting gore do it because they enjoy the content?

Also, to be clear to those who don't know, 'OP is a faggot' is supposed to be an ironic meme rather than hate speech. A terrible meme, but I wouldn't want people to misunderstand and think reddit has become a cesspool of hate.

It's the reporter equivalent of calling "LOL OP, you are such a short sighted faggot" and receiving precious HN karma for it. When you can't win a debate, you win by stinking it up and making others leave.

It is roughly the equivalent of calling someone "nigger" or "faggot" as an insult. When used in this way it is demeaning to the developmentally disabled.

Just as it wasn't comfortable for people dealing with the acceptance of homosexuals: I think everyone accepts that the word "faggot" is no longer appropriate. It would be far, far easier for everyone if they just, well, shut up.

I feel like half the time I post something intelligent I basically get a bunch of people calling me a faggot for reading books, more often than not with 'references' to Wikipedia to explain why I'm wrong. I feel the need to point out that this is not, in fact, a problem with Wikipedia.

Most of the criticism in this thread are just eloquent formulations of "Get off my lawn" and "your a faggot". No different from the literally tens of thousands of previous instances of situations where a new artistic medium or expression has been criticised.

Not all homophobes are virulent, frothing-at-the-mouth gay bashers who use the word "faggot" a lot. mostly its a pervasive attitude that homosexual relationships are "abnormal" or "ungodly" or something like that.

Where I live a very out, flaming gay dev once presented an app as a joke to detect what he called gaydar and was pointing it at uncomfortable suit guys and saying stuff like "you're a faggot dude, math doesn't lie". I thought it was a hilarious small moment of anarchy in an otherwise very dull conference full of banking apps.

The problem has quickly become that this revulsion has also played into the jock-centric bullying of anyone who dares to be different--"my football coach won't let me grow my hair long so now let me go punch that faggot with the plastic frames" sort of crap. Any indie community that still exists needs to rid itself of all this baggage for that reason alone.

The problem with iniciatives like these is that they make it hard for me to know that someone is the kind of person who would write "faggot" and "gayQuery" unironically. When toxic or just obnoxious people are instructed to hide behind crisp language, you only find out about their toxicity or obnoxiousness in person.

> 'gay' and 'faggot' are still a word used by virtually everyone to put things down as 'unmanly' or generally 'shameworthy' The fact you think "virtually everyone" does that certainly says a lot about you and the type of people you spend time with.

This is why we don't use the words "nigger", "kike", and "faggot" as insults anymore, why calling somebody a "pussy" or "woman" for not being aggressive or assertive enough is generally frowned upon, and, yes, why casually dropping the word "retarded" like it ain't no thang will get people for whom the word actually means something politely asking you not to use it anymore. Communication is a two-way street, and it's up to the listener to determine how they interpret the words coming out of your mouth.

The context behind the usage of the word "faggot" is much, much more important than the meaningless combination of the letters 'f','a','g','g','o', and 't' and the pronunciation of those combined letters. If an immature 13 year old were to input "faggot" in a text-to-speech program, the text-to-speech program would very clearly say "faggot". You wouldn't blame the program : it's just executing on a pronunciation algorithm. The context is just the manipulation of bits and bytes on a stream. It's harmless. You wouldn't exactly flog the kid, either, he just has a poor sense of humor, and you'd just roll your eyes at that. The problem we have with the word "faggot" is that, in the majority of cases, it's being used in a pretty offensive context, and said context says a lot of things about the person using the word.