It's another example of the conflation of "offensive" (violent, dangerous, aggressive) with "being offended" (shocked, scandalised, put out). They don't mean the same thing, but thanks to Ricky Gervais and his ilk we now have to pretend they do. https://twitter.com/Brainmage/status/1322130010162012160

We've talked about this before, but it bears repeating because it's a misunderstanding that underpins a huge amount of modern culture and debates about free speech.

The term "offensive" as applied to things like language or a joke actually means the same as it does when applied to something like a weapon or a crime. It's an "offense" in that it is a deliberate assault against someone or something, which is the word's original meaning.

At some point, probably during the time when the notion of the gentry took hold, there was such a fashion for manners and social graces that terms that had previously connoted things like physical violence were used to describe breaches of decorum.

Alexander Pope famously parodied this in his faux epic "The Rape of the Lock", in which a suitor illicitly obtaining a lock of his would-be lover's hair was presented as if it was an event of supernatural significance, akin to the fall of Troy.

From such centuries emerged the idea that an "offence" could also be something that caused a scandal or horrified polite society. That it could describe mere *impertinence*.

And even in the beginning - as Pope demonstrates - that sort of overreaction was being mocked. That's why "being offended" by some mild faux pas like swearing or someone using the wrong fork or something is seen as ridiculous. It was at the time too.

So we've retained that understanding of "to cause offence", associating it with ladies in petticoats fainting and tumbling monacles over minor breaches of etiquette. But "offensive" doesn't have anything to do with this.

In the early 21st Century, the two meanings became conflated. Someone mistook "offensive humour" to mean "humour that leads to someone being offended", with all the pearl-clutching that implies.

People aren't "offended" by racism or homophobia or whatever: rather, those things are an "offence" against the targetted groups and, indeed, civil society as a whole.

So now we have situations in which Nazi face tattoos - which are "offensive" in the sense that they are in themselves an act of violence and aggression towards people - are referred to as "causing offence" in the sense of people being mildly upset by them.

It makes something that is objectively dangerous to others (basically announcing that you'd happily exterminate a given group of people) into what is effectively a personal slight against individuals who choose to feel targetted by it.

This semantic drift shifts responsibility for violence from the attacker to the victim. You have *chosen* to "be offended [against]" which is self-evidently absurd.

We formulated this theory a month or two back and had never really considered it before. Doubtless others have noted and written on it already, but we've never read it elsewhere. But it explains a lot. https://twitter.com/ireneista/status/1322155437995696129?s=19

It's probably too late to turn the clock back on the idea that being a Nazi is the equivalent of Emma Woodhouse making a thoughtlessly cruel joke about Miss Bates at a picnic, but we can at least not play their game.

When someone accuses you of "being offended" by something they've done, consider whether that's accurate and refute it if necessary. Angry is not the same as offended. We weren't "offended" by the sight of the Nazi face tattoos: we were *angry* that they were treated as innocent.