Labels--honorific, pejorative, or otherwise--are an interesting use of language, because they have a function separate from the usual employment of words in human verbal language, which is relative and contextual.
The foundational sense of any given language term includes--practically requires--implicit recognition of its usage being embedded in the wider statement surrounding it, which is in turn embedded in a wider set of shifting contexts and statements that ultimately extends throughout the history of the language and its applications.* That web of associations implicitly allows for nuance, emphasis, voice, and subtle gradations of meaning that add richness to communication, but also place significant demands on the users--both on the ability of the speaker/writer to clearly articulate meaning, and for the ability of the listener to comprehend the meaning accurately. That level of communication permits complexity, but its ambiguities also increase the potential for semantic noise.
Labels simplify all of that. But relying on them exacts a serious cost: they're so reductive that they're liable to stand out from context, sometimes to the point of isolating the term and imbuing it with an undue importance, much greater than the language that surrounds it. Labels function in the currency of popular speech more like imperative commands: they take on a power similar to military orders, or computer programming instructions. That's how the reactive phenomenon known as "triggering" occurs. The mere exposure to a particularly fraught or "loaded" labeling term induces a reflex conditioned reaction, almost as if it's the only word received by the listener/reader. Some words are like that; they carry historical baggage. Which is to say that they still partake of the associative properties of other words, but--bitch!, liberal!, fascist!--they've been internally charged with exaggerated power. It's also inherent to the nature of Labels that the assume an "Is of Identity"; a label implies a totality of meaning and role. As a result, whenever they're applied-whether to another, or to oneself--they're reductive. That reduction leads to simplification, generalization, stereotype, and stasis. It resists modification or qualification--it doesn't necessarily rule it out, but the Label, a noun, is typically given an emphasis that overshadows the accompanying adjectives or adverbs.
The result of affixing a Label is to lower the resolution of a communication: to heighten the noise in a verbal exchange at the expense of the signal. This excessive noise quotient has a way of leading to bad consequences. And the reactive, triggering property does not reveal human consciousness at its most self-aware or impartial, to understate the case. It allows a means of using language manipulatively and exploitatively. There are gradations to what that manipulation constitutes that vary with the particular term, as contextualized by its baggage, its back-story. Consider the n-word, you know the one; it's both charged and contexualized. Used familiarly, it's a tactic of defusing the old pejorative baggage--but the recognition of the baggage remains, nonetheless. As such, it's questionable how effective such defusing is. Used in a context of hostility and goading, it's often triggering to a listener, and often intended to trigger--because the pejorative baggage is too recent in time to have been shed in favor of a neutral meaning. Which explains the problems that sometimes arise in the case of a third category of contextual usage: the incidental, as when someone quotes Huckleberry Finn in non-bowdlerized form and is faced with a triggered reaction from listeners. Or the context of using the term that's assumed casually, in a way that isn't intended as hostility, but more like overly familiar, or insufficiently cognizant of the sensitivities of the audience. "Leaning too hard, for a stranger", as it were.**
So that's a brief introduction to the problem with Labels and Pejoratives. For the more comprehensive unpacking of the subject, an entire subdiscipline of Linguistics was constructed: General Semantics, the discipline of interpreting and implying accurate definitions and connotation, of debugging the noise of meaning to achieve a more precise result, whether when transmitting/writing/speaking or receiving/reading/listening. The thinker who gets the most credit for inventing the rules of General Semantics was Alfred Korzybski. Korzybski was both a polyglot (someone fluent in several languages) and a polymath (highly skilled in several academic disciplines.) Anyone who gets into his work will find themselves in very tall weeds indeed. It's way over my poor brains. Fortunately, I found an introduction to the concepts of General Semantics to be sufficient to get the general idea, and the insights I obtained turned my whole head around, as the saying goes. For me, the worth of General Semantics begins with getting acquainted with a few foundational concepts: "time-binding", unexamined assumptions related to the ubiquitous resort to "the Is of Identity"; the additional cognitive perspective provided by employing the tactic of "e-prime"; practiced recollection of the axiom that "the map is not the territory"--that verbal language is merely an incomplete descriptive scrim, not the substance of existence itself. And then, once one has the general idea, the real fun begins: Applying those Insights. I suggest starting by examining whatever ideological label one might happen to apply to their own political leanings, as viewed in terms of the Is of Identity; in particular, noticing how one ight be reduced to Identitarian Essentialism, by assenting to a given Label. And then noticing how one applies similar Identity Labeling, to others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski
Hmm, big lecture. Ahh, what can I say...don't believe me. Ignore me. You're liable to stay stuck where you are, though: continually confused, triggered, and exploited by those with more skill at producing propaganda manipulations than you are at debugging them.
[* What the linguist Saussure referred to as "langue" (the idealized potential of a given language as implied by its structural features, vocabular, and semantic connotations, and the generation of all of the ways that meaning can be communicated by it, a set of utterances that is greater than what anyone can effectively catalog (although LLMs are trying, albeit without the “actual thought” part) and verbal subsets activated by using its conventions of meaning, "parole" (the specifics of how language is practically employed to communicate between humans, for whatever purpose.]
[**In the words of a great phrase that I got from reading Oscar Zeta Acosta. Who probably in turn picked it up for somewhere else, because that's the way language works: much too colorfully and poetically to be reduced to some "meme" shit. Memes, in the original coinage by Richard Dawkins, are conceptual terms and phrases provided with properties much more suitable to the problematic linguistic phenomenon being discussed here: memes are Labels. Particularly catchy labels. Branding. Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist who attempts to apply genetic concepts to human language, and he does not know what he is talking about. While I reject Dawkins' formulation, I'm fond of the neologized meaning of "meme", related to coupling a photo image with a caption. That's merely a frequently funny version of an editorial cartoon; the term is stripped of the pretension to Profound Truth that Dawkins asserted when he came up with "meme" as a concept. "Meme" isn't a concept; it's merely a Brand Name. The term Dawkins is groping for already exists: the word is "Idea." ]