ABSTRACT
Hate speech is a significant new categorizing term, denoting the deliberate or concerted use of provocative slurs or offensive epithets. First recorded in 1988 in the United States, it obviously reflects awareness of the power of language as the bearer of prejudice. However, the practice of stigmatizing foreigners, believers of “alien” religions, homosexuals, and outsiders in general has been established and de rigueur in English-speaking societies for centuries. The entry for ethnic insults shows that terms like infidel, bugger, coolie, and Jew in its various opprobrious senses have been in use for over four hundred years. More significantly, these and other hostile terms like dago, hottentot, frog, kaffir, nigger, and coon, first recorded in the period 1600-1800, were also included in major dictionaries, such as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (1884-1928) and Webster II (1934), usually without comment. These omissions indicate both a general insensitivity to such words and an assumption that a lexicographer’s function did not extend to giving usage labels for racist terms.
