Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

If you want to insult a woman, call her a prostitute. If you want to insult a man, call him a woman.

There are two types of semantic change: pejoration is where a word starts out with a neutral or positive meaning and eventually devolves to mean something negative. The opposite is called amelioration.

if you analyze a slur enough, eventually its sting is removed, like when you repeat a word over and over again until it loses all meaning and starts to sound weird.