Chapter 3 makes the case for classifying five grey area examples as hate speech in the ordinary sense of the term based on the global resemblance test. We also argue that Facebook’s community standard on hate speech is ambiguous, inconsistent, and incomplete in relation to these examples, and so recommend specific reforms. Section 3.2 looks at hybrid attacks, which, like personal insults, target specific individuals, but, like prototypical hate speech, also attack the groups to which targeted individuals belong and, go beyond standard protected characteristics. Section 3.3 investigates selective attacks, which are derogatory or insulting words that refer to only a subset of a group or else to an amalgamated set of people who belong to multiple groups. Section 3.4 scrutinises reverse attacks, which involve words used by members of groups typically perceived as victims against groups more usually considered perpetrators. Section 3.5 examines righteous attacks, which we associate with attacks in pursuit of some righteous cause. Finally, Section 3.6 assesses indirect attacks, wherein the speaker intentionally uses a derogatory word to address or target someone whom the speaker knows or presumes to be not a member of the group referred to by the word under its literal or primary meaning.

Chapter 2 identifies prototypical examples of hate speech and seeks to explain what makes them such. Section 2.2 lists the original examples of hate speech cited in Mari Matsuda’s seminal article on the legal concept. We then explain how, even though the ordinary and legal concepts of hate speech share paradigmatic examples, the ordinary concept now has its own extended body of exemplars. Section 2.3 attempts to plot the complex pattern of overlapping and criss-crossing similarities among these exemplars. Section 2.4 looks in more depth at one of the paradigmatic examples of hate speech, namely racial slurs such as ‘nigger’. We highlight similarities it shares with other prototypical examples of hate speech. Finally, Section 2.5 defends a particular account of what it means for a new example to have enough similarities with exemplars to count as hate speech. If there are enough similarities across at least four out of five of the distinguishing qualities of target, style, message, act, and effect, then this conceptually justifies applying the phrase ‘x is also hate speech’ to the new example. We dub this the global resemblance test.

The study highlights semantic, syntactic, and functional features of two novel slurs that have recently entered the Russian and Ukrainian languages as a result of the Ukrainian crisis. The words ukrop (dill) and vata (cotton wool) underwent a semantic shift and acquired new negative meanings which can now be used to refer to the opposing groups in hostile communication. The chapter highlights semantic aspects of the words ukrop and vata that make them particularly suitable for use in dehumanizing metaphors, but the main focus of the study is the grammatical changes ukrop and vata underwent as a result of the semantic shift. Used in their traditional senses, both nouns function as uncountable, mass, inanimate nouns. However, novel uses of these words as slurs prompt some unconventional grammatical structures. For example, vata now demonstrates some non-standard subject-verb agreement patterns, and ukrop is sometimes used as a countable noun when it refers to people. Ukrop, used in its new sense, is also moving from the inanimate to the animate noun class. This discussion of the deviations from the grammatical norm expands into a conversation of the connections between the linguistic changes these words are undergoing and extralinguistic context of their use.

This chapter investigates historical and modern case studies, and media and popular culture examples of discriminatory language related to race, ethnicity, and national origin. Following a discussion of overt racism (especially slavery, segregation, and the treatment of Native people in the United States), we discuss several case studies that reveal hidden racism against various groups of people. For example, we will look at the 1992 Presidential campaign when candidate Ross Perot referred to his audience of African Americans as “You People” in a speech, and the racial controversy surrounding celebrity chef Paula Deen’s use of racial slurs. We talk about the problems with the slogan All lives matter, the saying playing the race card, and why people found Donald Trump’s Twitter comment, “I love Hispanics!” to be offensive. This chapter also examines linguistic discrimination, otherwise known as linguicism. We look at expressions of xenophobia, nationalism, and prejudice against immigrants and minorities on the basis of the language they speak or their accent. We look at cases in the media, within the education system, and the workplace. For example, we discuss Mock Spanish, Engrish, anti-Muslim prejudice, and we look at cases where people have been ordered to Speak English or get out of America!

“Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.” Words do, however, sometimes hurt. Speech that promotes condoning or actually practicing physical violence is not just unpleasant but dangerous. An orchestrated war of words preceded the Rwandan genocidal slaughter. Hutu political leaders actively promoted using forms meaning ‘snake’ and ‘cockroach’ in talking of Tutsi neighbors, which made slaughtering those neighbors more readily acceptable to ordinary Hutu. The N-word in contemporary America is often used in diverse objectionable and sometimes dangerous ways. At the same time, there are affiliative uses within some black communities. And mentioning the word in order to criticize racist linguistic practices should be supported, not punished as continues to happen. Native Americans continue to protest being turned into mascots for sports teams; they resist suggestions that team names ‘honor' them. Semantic derogation of women continues, but some have tried to embrace derisive terms like slut, efforts that are unwelcome to some self-identified feminists. Even what many have heralded as successful reclamation of the term queer for non-heterosexuals, purging it of its negative flavor, does not work for all. Words harm by making public and more ‘acceptable’ the social hostility and potential violence of those using (not ‘mentioning’) them.

Jary and Kissine examine the meaning of imperative sentences, taking the existing relevance-theoretic semantic analysis, in terms of the desirability and potentiality of the described state of affairs, as their point of departure. In their view, a complete account of the interpretation of imperatives has to explain how they can result in the addressee forming an intention to perform an action, and this requires the theory to make room for ‘action representations’ (in addition to factual representations, such as assumptions). They claim that the imperative form is uniquely specified to interface with such action representations.

In this chapter, Diane Blakemore focuses on two kinds of linguistic phrase which seem to be inherently expressive, nominal epithets such as 'the idiot' and small clauses such as 'you angel'. Blakemore argues against accounts that treat these structures as linguistically encoding the property of expressiveness and in favour of a relevance-theoretic account according to which they communicate a particular conceptual content that guides the addressee in identifying the attitude the speaker holds towards the target individual. Expressiveness arises when the main relevance of the utterance comes from this information about speaker attitude.