If it sounds like I'm treating them as they were harmless, that's not what I mean. I'm just worried about taking people like that at their own inflated valuation; and bending to their distortion of the language seems to be going in that direction.

If a word is being used as an insult, in principle there's a rationale for other people to adopt it to described themselves. When Danny Cohn-Bendit in 1968 was being attacked as being "a German Jew", there were thousands of students on the streets chanting "We are all German Jews," as a way of demonstrating solidarity.