If Burchill had used similar venom against Jewish or black people, would there be any backlash against the article being withdrawn?
— Owen Jones🌹 (@OwenJones84) January 14, 2013
Well, I’d seen the twitterflap, so I read the bloody thing in the paper. The obvious point that came to mind was that if you tried to rewrite it about black people, it would be grossly racist and completely unacceptable, and so on with gays or, heaven forbid, Jews. It has the structure of hate-speech. In fact, it struck me that the main problem I would have faced trying to edit it for use on a different minority would have been finding enough synonyms to keep it readable.
What I needed was a Bigoted Thesaurus, something like Wikipedia’s list of ethnic slurs but including other forms of hatred and organised as a thesaurus rather than a dictionary. That reminded me of the word “soapdodger”, which reliably makes me grin.
Come on. Bigoted Thesaurus. You’d buy it.