Terms of disparagement (or fighting words) are pejorative terms such as yid, kike, nigger, whore, slut, fag and queer whose use usually arouses painful feelings in the target, members of the targeted group or sympathizers.
Etiquette experts recommend these terms be avoided in polite society. In impolite society, they may indeed cause a fight.
See also: List of ethnic slurs, List of sexual slurs
In its 1942 decision, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, the Supreme Court of the United States articulated the fighting words doctrine, a limitation of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech.
Chaplinsky, a Jehovah's Witness, had said to a New Hampshire town marshall who was attempting to prevent him from preaching: "You are a God-damned racketeer" and "a damned Fascist" and was arrested. The Court upheld the arrest and stated:
Fighting Words and the First Amendment of the U.S. constitution
The Court has continued to uphold the doctrine, but despite this vigorous statement, it has also steadily narrowed the grounds on which fighting words are held to apply. In Street v. New York (1969), which overturned a statute prohibiting flag-burning, the Court held that mere offensiveness of fighting words was not enough, and that the threat of actual violence must be present. Similarly, in Cohen v. California (1971), the fact that Cohen had been arrested for wearing a jacket that said "Fuck the draft" did not constitute uttering fighting words since there had been no "personally abusive epithets".
Finally, in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992), the Court overturned a statute prohibiting racial slurs on the grounds that governments could not prohibit some fighting words (racial slurs) and not others. The court went on to assign some free-speech value to fighting words:
- It is not true that "fighting words" have at most a "de minimis" expressive content, or that their content is in all respects worthless and undeserving of constitutional protection"; sometimes they are quite expressive indeed. We have not said that they constitute "no part of the expression of ideas," but only that they constitute "no essential part of any expression of ideas."
In more recent decisions, the Court has held that fighting words must "reasonably incite the average person to retaliate" and risk "an immediate breach of the peace" or they could not be prohibited.
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