Who decides if a word is racist?
I swear Rod Liddle was smiling down on me last week, as I found myself tussling with an editor. I’d written a sentence containing the word “Chinamen.” She wanted me to remove it, because, she said, “Chinaman” is widely acknowledged to be a racial slur. In my view, words have no single intrinsic meaning. Within limits, they can mean a variety of things, differing according to context – not least the tone of voice in which they’re delivered. Even “Yes” can mean “No,” when said by an Englishman trained in the subtle art of oblique speech.
