The Random House Offensiveness Quotient
Authors: do you sometimes worry about employing excessively salty language? Do you fret about offending readers with your otherwise innocent descriptors? Don’t you wish there was a way of determining once and for all the words that amuse and the words that affront?
Well now there is! The friendly people at Random House Reference have devised a revolutionary – and handy! – chart for just such a purpose, called the O.Q., or the Offensiveness Quotient. As they state on their website:
When we label sensitive terms for Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, there are a lot of factors to consider. The way we decide has to do with how offensive a word is (the degree to which a word offends the person it is used to describe) and how disparaging a word is (the degree to which the person who uses the word intends for it to be hurtful).
To decide how to label a word, we go through a process that is something like the chart we give below. We call it the O.Q., or “offensiveness quotient” – modeled after the more familiar I.Q. (Intelligence Quotient). […] Basically, the O.Q. is the average of a term’s rank on the scales of Disparagement and Offensiveness.
Thanks to the O.Q. chart, we here at Q&Q now know that while it is not particularly desirable to refer to someone of the feminine persuasion as “the little woman,” it is still preferable to referring to her as “baby.” Similarly, calling someone of European descent a “honky” is worse than calling them “whitey,” but not nearly as bad as calling them “cracker.” We’re not exactly sure how “spaz” can be considered more slanderous than “harelip,” but then, who are we to question such a finely honed system?
What’s noteworthy is the way RH seems to have deliberately included negative terms for both white and black people in equal numbers at the highest levels of the disparagement scale — even though the “anti-white” terms are really archaic. I forget the last time I heard the word “ofay” actually spoken (if ever), and I think more people would laugh at the word “honky” than be offended.
I had to double-check — I thought you had linked to The Onion…