 The sense of ‘offense’ in (1) tracks how audiences actually respond at the moment of utterance. This could not be the sense in which offense is understood for at least two reasons. First, doing so would make the claim ‘slurs are offensive’ too strong. Since we would be tracking cases of actual offense, we would be focusing on particular uses of slurs, explaining what makes those utterances offensive rather than explicating the offensiveness of a linguistic class. As a result, the most natural interpretation of the claim would be that slurring utterances are invariably offensive, i.e., the use of slurs always provokes disliked mental states.