Why should one group of people acquiesce to another group of people's demands just because they claim offensiveness.
Should everyone live to the strictest thinkable standards because somewhere out there is a semi-large group of people who find your behavior offensive?
Such semi-large groups might be religions for example that take various kinds of behaviors you take for granted as offensive.
It's not that you have to. It's a social grace to not offend people. If you really want to, you are allowed to. But when society says to fuck off -- well, you got what you paid for.
People getting offended is not the issue. If everyone chose to never offend anybody else, my mother would never know that she makes bad pasta and we'd all have to eat bad pasta 3 times a week.
You want to draw the line at marginalizing a group of people or trivializing something serious like racism. But you want to make sure you are doing it in a way that isn't inhibiting legitimate thoughts, studies, projects, etc. from making it into the public sphere.
Every time you censor speech you stifle legitimate dialog because people will be uncertain whether their thoughts are legitimate or just offensive.
Millions of people find all kinds of things offensive. One half of the political spectrum finds the other offensive. That doesn't mean we just ban everything.
Or they could go "It's open source, go submit a pull request". You know, the human approach instead of the PC Police approach where they appeal to authority and have a faceless one Demand the PC filter to be applied.
I agree with what you're getting at, but at the same time it's reasonable to say that a non-trivial number of people are offended by the term.. So even while most people don't take offense, I don't think it's wrong to describe the word as offensive.
Can we stop saying this as a universal truth?
You find it offensive. I and millions other people don't. You deal with it.