Racial slurs for the whole family, impress your friends with your vast knowledge of hate!

This page is a list of some words and phases to avoid that are less commonly known to be harmful, with brief explanations of why they are harmful. For the sake of brevity, I'm not including things that are more commonly known to be harmful. Because finding alternative language can be an important part of

TheJargonFile - The Jargon File - a modern version

The meanings and origins of thousands of English phrases, sayings, idioms, expressions and proverbs that we use daily.

Discover invented words for complex emotions in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows—a poetic lens on the human condition and the hidden depths of feeling.

dunce

“But now in our age it is growne to be a common prouerbe in derision, to call such a person as is senselesse or without learning a Duns, which is as much as a foole.”

Francis Thynne, Holinshed’s Chronicles, 1587

The word dunce hasn’t always meant, well, dunce. Named for Scottish scholastic theologian John Duns Scotus, it first referred to a follower of Duns’s teachings, says the OED. Then it gained the derisive meaning of “a hair-splitting reasoner,” due to later philosophers who ridiculed his work, as well as “a dull pedant” and finally someone dull-witted.

Dunce cap might have first been used by Charles Dickens in his novel, The Old Curiosity Shop: “Displayed on hooks upon the wall in all their terrors, were the cane and ruler; and near them, on a small shelf of its own, the dunce’s cap, made of old newspapers and decorated with glaring wafers of the largest size.”

Green’s Dictionary of Slang is the largest historical dictionary of English slang.

A glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by programmers in the early days of computing.