> Pinker also talks about the "Euphemism Treadmill", where words that were specific medical terms turned into general insults and became unusable because of it ("spastic" in my lifetime has gone from a medical description, to a playground insult, to being effectively unusable, a non-word).

The choice of the example "spastic" is interesting for two reasons. First, it seems to be an exception among the trajectories of a constellation of related medical terms. Second, because it shines a light on some of the better ways that we've actually come to use these terms (as opposed to how their usage is conventionally perceived by those in a fever about PC run amok).

To take the first point, consider the originally medical terms "idiot," "moron," "imbecile," and so on. These were formerly used to describe degrees of mental disability in a medical context. I don't know for sure if the normative overtones were present in their original usage (Overtones that say, for example, "The person so labeled is sad, and/or unfit, and/or undesirable."), but I would be surprised if these terms were really as purely medical and otherwise neutral as terms like, for example, "Parkinsonian syndrome," "tremor," or "fracture," & etc. Their trajectories seem to have ended, for what seem to be contingent historical reasons, in their medical disuse and rhetorical popularity. "Trump is an imbecile," "Jim Jordan is an idiot," and so on. These bits of invective have entirely lost their medical denotative senses and function almost entirely rhetorically and connotatively, to wide acceptance. IOW, from medical description, to insult with continued medical usage, to being effectively ubiquitous as insults with not medical denotative sense. Interestingly, and contrary to the OP's assertion of the state of usage, "spastic" absolutely continues in medical usage. It refers to conditions that cause spasms, or to conditions and organs that are affected by spasms; the term "spastic colon" should put one's mind at ease on this point, if less at ease in certain other aspects.

In exploring this first point, and in considering the related terms "retard" and "retarded" that have gone through trajectories that have gone on to wide opprobrium, I'm not so sure we can really condemn this as PC run amok. This leads to my second point. It probably was very difficult for people with those constellations of conditions labeled as "retarded," people who were reduced to their diagnosis by being called "retards," to move about in a world where those terms carried the explicit weight of being used to insult people's worth and intelligence. "You are retarded. Shut up and feel your unworthiness, preferably away from me, because you are unpleasant," is really what is being said. "Not you, [or your relative]. They're one of the good ones [or they're not so bad]," probably did little to salve those wounds. In this regard, I feel that the trajectory of usage from medical term to vulgar insult to effectively unusable word results not from PC run amok, wrecking the language before we have a chance to cope, but rather from compassion and kindness working all too slowly against needless cruelty and defensiveness of long habit within the public consciousness to a genuinely better state of affairs, with the minor cost that some people get too wound up about protesting those words, and others getting too wound up about having the height of their robust expressive powers snatched away by the zephyrs of fashion.

> I'm all in support of reclaiming words. If we use "supremacy" for lots of other things, then its association with racists fades. Giving them sole use of such a useful word seems to be letting the bad people win, somehow.

I'm not sure that this is precisely how reclamation usually works. Reclamation is, historically, work undertaken at some cost by an oppressed group to take some the venom out of a term used to oppress them. Two prominent examples come immediately to mind: "nigger" and "queer." In the first case, reclamation of the n-word by black people in America entails not only at least tacit approval of its use within black communities and among black people, but a near prohibition of its use among white people--meant to insure that care and thought are used before engaging with the term--due to its history as a tool of oppression, and its continued present-day use as a term of oppression. "Queer," among non-cis persons, has had a trajectory that has landed similarly, but with much less strict of a prohibition against its use within the dominant in-group. (I suspect the difference has to do with the prospects the two communities have of "passing" within the larger culture; everybody knows you're black, and we don't need to look too long in the news to find heartbreaking examples of discrimination, the tip of that iceberg, only, being revealed to us in lawsuits against banks, workplaces, and the like. Gay people can at least pass, and are therefore perceived otherwise as diverse as, or not as diverse as, the general population. More, therefore, is too be gained from a conciliatory, even welcoming, set of rules around the reclaimed word.)

The contrast with "we" reclaiming "supremacy" should be clear. Numerically, to the extent that HN is US-centric, and more so to the extent that HN is tech heavy, "we" are white. Here, "supremacy," in its denotative sense, is about a normative schema that holds "us" as being deserving of the top position socially and economically. How much "work" are we going to have to do to "reclaim" this word? And to what end? We're just going to use it, from behind our keyboards, so that...other stupid people on the Internet know that we're the boss of us? It seems hardly worth getting in an uproar over.

What is worth talking about, without perhaps descending into an uproar, is this conventionally simplistic idea that "they are taking all our words from us because they are white knights compensating for their guilt or frailty." That idea, I hope is apparent now, largely functions reflexively to try to undo the real language work that has been done by minorities, the disabled, and their advocates to build a slightly less demeaning and fairer world (for us all, ultimately). If it means I have to say "Quantum Spiffiness" instead of "Quantum Supremacy" (HINT: It doesn't.), then I'm all for that kind of PC thought control run amok. The cost is clearly worth it, because I can get a job, and a home loan, and can walk down the street without suspicion of being a criminal, and everyone should have that opportunity; if I could remedy all those injustices by simply leaving a few words out of my vocabulary for the rest of my life, or if I could even help make the world a slightly better place by just being cautious and thoughtful with my usage, then sign me up.