It usually starts as a joke.

“Nothing is brighter than the brightest star.
My phone flashlight is brighter than nothing.
Therefore my flashlight is brighter than the brightest star.”

QED—if you squint hard enough and stop thinking.

Or the old Norwegian chestnut:

Mor Nille kan ikke fly.
En sten kan ikke fly.
Ergo Mor Nille er en sten.

The logical flaw is obvious, which is precisely the point. In Erasmus Montanus (1723), Ludvig Holberg used this kind of syllogistic abuse to mock academic pedantry: airtight form, zero sense. Erasmus proves his own mother is a stone, and everyone else can see he’s an idiot.

These examples are funny because they expose how natural language breaks when you pretend it’s formal logic—or when you swap meanings mid-argument and hope nobody notices.

Unfortunately, that same failure mode now shows up in places where the stakes are much higher.

From logic jokes to language landmines

Consider an example I saw in a YouTube clip from Linus Tech Tips. The phrase “hard R” came up. Confusion followed.

One person heard “hard R” as a reference to a racial slur.
Another understood it as an older, now-offensive slang term for intellectual disability.
I understood it phonetically.

In linguistics, “hard R” can reasonably be taken to mean a fully articulated rhotic, as opposed to a weakened, vocalized, or dropped R. In Norwegian terms, that distinction is immediately intuitive:

• A soft R like the R in Lars, lightly articulated and non-rolling
• Versus the hard, trilled or tapped R common across Scandinavia and Germany — the “machine-gun” R of brrrr, det er kaldt
• Or a word like rømmegrøt, where the rolling R is unmistakable to any Nordic ear

English largely lacks this contrast, which is why the confusion arises. Outside of Scottish English (and to some extent Irish and Welsh accents), English Rs are typically approximants rather than trills. The only truly universal English example of a rolled R is the onomatopoeic brrrr — precisely because it is imitating a sound, not using it phonemically.

From a phonetic standpoint, then, my interpretation was neither exotic nor unreasonable. It was simply outnumbered by newer, taboo-driven meanings that have crowded out the technical one.

All three interpretations exist. None are invented. Yet only one is socially survivable in 2025—and that meaning has effectively vaporized the others.

This is how language breaks: not through malice, but through taboo gravity. Once a term becomes associated with a high-voltage offense, all other meanings get sucked into the blast radius.

Intent stops mattering. Context stops mattering. Precision becomes collateral damage.

The euphemism treadmill at full speed

Which brings us to the big one.

Yes, the fully pronounced n-word is offensive regardless of speaker. No serious person disputes that.
Yes, the softened variant (“nigga”) functions as an in-group term among many black speakers—sometimes affectionate, sometimes not. That’s about social license, not semantics.
And yes, saying “the n-word” is an avoidance strategy: a way to reference the concept without performing the speech act.

But let’s not pretend this is philosophically clean.

Saying “the n-word” still puts the word in the listener’s head. The speaker avoids uttering it, but the listener does the reconstruction internally. That matters socially—but it doesn’t magically erase meaning. It just relocates responsibility.

This is not a moral failing. It’s how euphemism works. But we should at least be honest about it.

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“Words = violence” and other category errors

When people object to the idea that “words are violence,” they are not denying that language can harm. They are objecting to category collapse.

Originally, this framing came from speech-act theory: the idea that some speech participates in coercive systems. Fair enough.

What we have now is inflation:

Structural harm → emotional harm → offense → violence

Once everything is violence, the word loses analytical value. Worse, it encourages intellectual laziness. Referential use, descriptive use, quotation, insult, and incitement are treated as morally identical acts.

They are not.

Calling all of it “violence” is the moral equivalent of proving Mor Nille is a stone. The syllogism may feel righteous, but it doesn’t describe reality.

Semantic drift, imported taboos, and Norwegian absurdities

This gets especially messy outside the Anglosphere.

When I grew up, the Norwegian word “neger” was a neutral descriptor: someone of sub-Saharan African descent. It was not an insult. There was nothing remotely pejorative about it.

Today it is treated as almost as bad as the English slur—not because of Norwegian usage, but because English-language racial history has been retroactively imposed on cognates.

That’s not linguistic inevitability. It’s cultural hegemony.

The same contradiction appears with “svart”. “Black” is acceptable in English. Svart—its literal translation—is often treated as suspect. The problem is not semantics; it’s association.

So we reach for “mørkhudet”—“dark-skinned”—which is so broad it can refer to half the planet. Precision is sacrificed on the altar of safety, and everyone pretends this is progress.

It isn’t. It’s euphemism treadmill failure.

Cleaning up the past by breaking it

The final insult is retroactive sanitization.

Editing Mark Twain (no more “Nigger Jim“).
Rewriting Astrid Lindgren (Pippi’s dad is no longer “Negerkonge“).
Removing words instead of explaining them.

This treats readers as incapable of understanding historical context and replaces education with erasure. Contextualization is responsible. Alteration is not.

Preserving the record is not endorsement. It’s honesty.

What actually went wrong

The problem is not empathy.
The problem is not language evolving.

The problem is conceptual sloppiness masquerading as moral clarity.

Ethics has swallowed semantics whole, and meaning is paying the price. When referential speech is treated as violence, confusion is inevitable. When taboo replaces explanation, misunderstanding is guaranteed.

Holberg understood this three hundred years ago. Bad logic doesn’t just lead to wrong conclusions—it makes smart people say ridiculous things with total confidence.

And once that happens, it’s not Mor Nille who turns into a stone.
It’s the language itself.