"Thing about special needs is horrid teenagers (and adults, shamefully) have started to use 'special' as an insult. I was at a dinner party with a teacher, FFS, who went on about one of her pupils being a bit 'special' while pulling a face...
No idea what can be done about it, apart from finding new words every time the fuckers turn the current non-discriminatory word into an insult. "
Is it not the words that are the problem, but horrible people.
You can ban all the words you like, you could have them magically stricken from the language, but horrible people will still find a way of being nasty to people who are different.
I suppose the thing to do there is educate in schools - not about racism, sexism, homophobia etc etc as where does that leave the ginger person or the disabled person or the person with a squint or whatever it might be that sets them apart. If you simply teach inclusivity and caring and compassion and how difference is not a bad thing maybe that would help. Rather then picking certiain "topics" and concentrating on them but missing the overall point. So that it's not "don't say nigger beacuse it's offensive" but "think before you say anything how it will feel to the person you are saying it to".
You need to give examples because many people do not realise what these words actually mean - kids use words like gay and mong without actually connecting them to where the word comes from. They are a part of their everyday language - so education as to what these (the more obviously offensive words) mean would help.
I think that people also need to accept that there is a difference between someone saying something horrible to someone, by picking on their difference, it totally different to people using words casually without realising what they mean. So the "a bit OCD" thing is something people said a lot in my old work - they weren't using it "at" people with OCD to be horrible, they were using a phrase which had become popular to describe a certain behaviour (which was not OCD). If someone had told them that OCD sufferers found it really offensive then they would have stopped.
Which then leads onto the other point that different people are offended by different things, some people are offended by things that you would never have thought of. Like "idiot" for example. As you can never tell who is offended by what (apart from obvious things) then surely it is better to try and leave it to common sense and people saying if they find something offensive, rather than wiping a whole load of words from teh language (which won't happen anyway).
Also I am always interested to note that different people with the same difference will find different things offensive. So if there is no consensus among the community how is anyone else supposed to know what's right and what's wrong? Which is where common sense comes in again.
Otherwise you get people trying to ban words and phrases which are actually fine, which alienates people who start thinking "pc gorn mad" and the whole message is weakened.