Who decides if a word is racist?

I swear Rod Liddle was smiling down on me last week, as I found myself tussling with an editor. I’d written a sentence containing the word “Chinamen.” She wanted me to remove it, because, she said, “Chinaman” is widely acknowledged to be a racial slur. In my view, words have no single intrinsic meaning. Within limits, they can mean a variety of things, differing according to context – not least the tone of voice in which they’re delivered. Even “Yes” can mean “No,” when said by an Englishman trained in the subtle art of oblique speech. Sure, “Chinaman,” given a...