Jess Zafaris

You can yell the F word at absolutely anything, including the universe.

You can throw it in as a word for emphasis.

It can mean almost anything these days, whereas slurs are still very targeted and they're used to marginalize and harm people.

I think it comes down to respect and in groups.

So for a little while, I have a relatively active community on TikTok, and I was tagged into a series of videos where Indigenous Australian people were saying that they didn't like the use of the word Aboriginal to describe them.

Their argument was that the prefix ab sounds negative because it's in words like abnormal.

It's not always negative.

It's also in the word abound.

It means off or away from.

So it can be used to make a word sound negative, but it can also be used to mean any type of motion away from something or any action off of something.

So when I was tagged into this, I did make a video saying, you know, it's not inherently negative, but it is a pretty Eurocentric term.

The term Aboriginal first described people who dispersed across Europe from Rome.

So it is a Eurocentric term.

And also, really, the kicker here is that because I'm not Aboriginal, because I am not an Indigenous Australian person, I don't get to decide whether that word hurts someone else.

If someone...

says that they don't like to be called by a certain name if they prefer different pronouns and other people continue to use them.

It's a decision on the part of the speaker to continue using a term that the other person has already told them feels disrespectful.

It all comes down to in groups.

If someone who is an Indigenous Australian prefers that term, then they are more than welcome to.

And it's up to them to decide whether that's a hurtful or hateful term