Actually, I was generalizing. I stated that otherwise innocent things (like words) can take on a much more sinister meaning when they become used as a derogatory statement, like the word "Jap" was. I mentioned the swastika as a more tangable example of this.
To add to my original point, we all know what the Swastika now means, and what it represents, as we have all been taught what it was used for. Part of our lifetime experience does (or should) include being taught in history classes what happened in WWII, and what the Swastika came to represent. However, I would suggest that the same is not true for certian words, such as Jap, so there are people who dont fully understand the negative connotation of the word.
Nobody is born with racist or bigoted opinions or feelings. Those grow out of our experiences and our teachers. I find it interesting that people are getting on certian people's cases because they were not taught that the word is considered a racial slur. In an ideal world, everyone would share that ignorance, because if nobody believed the word is "evil", it would lose it's meaning.
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