Throughout my life, I’ve heard words referring to gay people tossed around as casual insults, often used as weapons against people who are not themselves gays or lesbians (see, for example, the use of “no homo“). It’s behavior like this that can make it difficult to know which words we should call each other.
Interestingly, while terms like faggot are pretty obviously hurtful, people may have considerably different perceptions of terms like homosexual. Jeremy Peters writes “To most ears, it probably sounds inoffensive. A little outdated and clinical, perhaps, but innocuous enough: homosexual”. Yet as Peters notes, some gays and lesbians find the term offensive. In fact, in 2006, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) listed it as an offensive term.
linguistic pulse 