The point I was trying to make at 07 Jul 09 - 12:48 PM, which seems to have got lost in the melee, is that there are three factors in this whole offensiveness thing.

One is whether the offence is widespread - whether it's "significant offence" in GUEST,Martin's words. I don't think this matters in the slightest. (Apparently, neither does GUEST,Martin, so that's one thing we can agree on.) Lots of people can take offence wrongly; one person can take offence with good reason.

Another factor is whether the offence is intentional. GUEST,Martin - along with lots of other people - thinks this is crucial: if you're convinced that what you're doing isn't meant offensively, then it's not offensive; as for anyone who takes offence, that's their look-out & their ignorance. I think this is completely and utterly wrong and that whether the offence is intentional is not very important at all. Lots of people use racist expressions on a regular basis without having the slightest racist intention. A friend of mine back in the early 80s would regularly refer to a swindle or a ripoff as a "jew"; when I called him on it he looked genuinely puzzled and said he'd never thought it might be the same word(!). He wasn't anti-Jewish in the slightest, but it was still an anti-Jewish expression.

The third factor, which I think is the most important, is what (if anything) the offence is grounded in. Yes, lots of people take offence at lots of different things, but whether or not we pay attention to them depends on what they're offended about, not what they're offended by. If someone tells me they're boycotting the local greengrocer because he sells Argentinian fruit, I'm not going to investigate whether he does sell Argentinian fruit and then decide whether to join the boycott: I'm not offended about the issue of selling Argentinian fruit, so I don't care whether someone's offended by a local shop doing it. If someone tells me they're boycotting the greengrocer because he's sacked an assistant who came out as gay, I'm going to take that a lot more seriously: I am offended about anti-gay prejudice, so I do care if someone's offended by someone expressing it.

As for 21st-Century post-Bedlams Revival Border Morris, I do find racism offensive, so if someone says they find a particular practice racist - or they feel that it expresses racist attitudes or reflects racist images - my immediate assumption is that they may have a point; I think they're saying something that's worth investigating and thinking about seriously. And "we've been doing it for a while and we want to carry on" doesn't really hack it for me.