There are always going to be linguistic taboos, because words have meaning & some things are unacceptable. It's telling that boomers and older can't abide words like "fuck" and "vagina" but think they should be able to use demographic slurs, while younger gens have flipped that.
There are words my friends hiss and recoil from, but they're all words that are ideologically harmful to material realities of humans: racist, sexist, *phobic, and other words that demean PEOPLE. Whereas our parents assert their right to use those, while objecting to baby words.
Like, "curses" and "swears" growing up in the 80s/90s/00s were all scatological, sexual, or deistic. And there's a whole area of study around what a given culture uses to swear! But it sounds SO pathetic to hear adults go, "Hey now!" when somebody says "ass" near them.
There may be something about boomers & up hiding from their bodies, treating normal bodily functions as so shameful they cannot be spoken, while obsessing over biological differences in skin, hair, and genitals as genocide-worthy offenses. That's something to think about!
But I just found myself going, "Wait is it weird that my friends have taboo words?" There's the conservative assertion that, "Well, I should be able to use ANY word because who cares, they're just words!" But we know that's not true. And it's not wrong to reject certain words.
The question is, what do we reject? What do we weaponize? What do we protect? Older generations weaponize bodies and defend oppressive norms while rejecting their own physicality. Whereas, widely, younger people want to protect bodies and identity while attacking ideology.
And this is a fundamental difference that conservatives don't seem to get. There's a difference between attacking someone's IDEAS vs attacking their BODIES. Being a Republican (ideas, incorrect, hurtful) isn't the same thing as being a person of color (bodies, normal, valid).
You can't be BORN wrong. Nothing about your physiology — not your skin, shape, genes, conditions, genitals, none of it — is invalid. Using words that demean people based on those characteristic IS wrong. It's immoral to be cruel toward people simply for existing.
But you can have wrong ideas. You can BE wrong in the way you regard our world, other people, and yourself. It's super easy to be wrong. Slurs represent wrong thinking. The whole human experience is learning, over and over again, what you were wrong about — and adapting.
And so, "boomer." It's not a slur. It's not making fun of people for just being older. It's a term being used now to encapsulate an ideology of ignorance, irresponsibility, selfishness, and disrespect. Those are common traits among older US people, for historical reasons.
And none of this is PURELY about age. There are teen boomers, because their inherited ideology sucks. And there are great older folks who still put in the work to learn and grow despite our nightmare history of oppression and violence. "ok boomer" signifies exhaustion with lazy thinking.
So it's HILARIOUS that an old white guy would get so hurt by "boomer" that he would ignore history, context, and good sense and compare boomer to the n-word. Unbelievable. Fuck off, boomer. :)