You're an ethnic slur!

[Neal Whitman]

Probably because of the "slur" thread that began here last month (see link
at bottom), I got to thinking about a phrasing I heard on NPR this morning:
"called him an ethnic slur." I pictured someone telling someone else, "You
ethnic slur!" or "You're an ethnic slur, you know that?" If it had been
written, as "called him a[n ethnic slur]," that wouldn't be so strange, but
in spoken English, it reminds me of actually saying things like "expletive
deleted" or "beeeeep" in avoidance of taboo language.

Searches for "called him an ethnic slur" and "called him a racist slur" on
Google got ~300 and ~3000 hits, respectively (which then boiled down to 32
and 23 hits). On COCA, "[call].[v*] [p*] [at*] [j*]" slur brought up these
three hits:

When a classmate called him a racial slur during an intramural game, for
instance, (2010)
Not a week goes by that a bus driver doesn't call me a racist slur. (2006)
And what if you call them one slur but call them a different slur the next
day? (1993)

Earlier "slur" thread:
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ADS-L;9a62767e.1203D

Neal

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