WHAT’S in an epithet? It would seem that the social currency of homophobia is disappearing quickly. But lest you get too optimistic, a new site has the numbers in, and they don’t look great. See for yourself: NoHomophobes.com has a real-time tracker of homophobic language on Twitter. The website is charitable: it doesn’t assume that the tweets are meant to be hurtful. Instead, it aims to spotlight "casual homophobia"—the unknowing, but still harmful, use of derogatory language. "Faggot" and "that’s so gay", staple taunts in high schools across America, are some of the terms tracked on the site. But the website's moderators at the University of Alberta are clear about casual homophobia's impact:

Words and phrases like “faggot,” “dyke,” “no homo,” and “so gay” are used casually in everyday language, despite promoting the continued alienation, isolation and — in some tragic cases — suicide of sexual and gender minority (LGBTQ) youth.

There are some spikes and drops documented by the website—for example, August 13th saw a sharp increase in the instance of "dyke"; August 22nd, "faggot"—but they don't appear to clearly match real-world events, perhaps underscoring the fickle nature of this sort of language.

I followed the website for a day recently. "Faggot" had been written nearly 30,000 times on Twitter by the time I sat down for dinner. From July 5th to yesterday, the word had been written 3.4m times. In isolation, one instance of "faggot" might simply offend. In aggregate, the numbers are dizzying.