 Perhaps the type of expression most often cited as the paradigm case of hate speech is slurs. Slurs are typically characterized as a type of insult that targets race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, ability, politics, immigrant status, geographic region, and other categories. Much of the literature on slurs focuses primarily on the semantic and pragmatic properties of this linguistic class, with the expectation that such analyses also provide an account of how they in fact derogate their targets. There are, of course, competing accounts, some of which may be better suited than others for the purposes of legal and ordinary concepts of hate speech.