The answer might not matter: by making the issue of gay slurs a serious one, the association spurred a national conversation, and it surely made some kid in a pickup game somewhere think of a different word to use.
It is plausible and perhaps even standard to think of slurs as semantically expressing a certain descriptive property (being a member of such and such a group, say) while also conventionally expressing a negative attitude towards those with the property.
But sometimes a solely jaded response betrays our own complacency, like resigning yourself to the fact that there will always be people who think of racist slurs as banter, or those who think it is just fine to appropriate the symbols of others to give their own tepid existence some edge, or people who still wear bootcut jeans.
"He did not notice things about people that he considered uncomplimentary," Professor Jeffries said of Justice Powell, who he said thought homosexuality "was a slur or an embarrassment".
And yet I really am struggling to think of anyone else who has repeatedly used racial slurs on international TV and still brought home an estimated £3m annual earnings.
We rained down every slur and stereotype you can think of.
"Tar is the closest I can think of," she continues, describing her daughter's colouring; a reminder of Morrison's reclamation of the racial slur in the title of her 1981 novel Tar Baby.
The word stylish in this way of thinking becomes a slur, as does the word beautiful".
We tend to think of German as harsh and guttural, but it's also a language of slurs and whispers, and at Christmas it shows its softer side.
Some people think using "gay" as a slur isn't that big of a deal.
