There are exceptions to that pattern, but “redskin” isn’t among them. By the 1970s, the word was widely considered as a slur. All modern dictionaries label it as offensive or disparaging, just at they do the N-word—no journalist would begin a story, “Redskin astronaut John Herrington was honored last night…” Not all Indians object to the word, it’s true. In surveys, it’s offensive to 35 to 45 percent of Indians enrolled in tribes, but far fewer among the much larger—and rapidly growing—population who self-identify as Indians, many out of a spiritual affinity or a family legend about a Cherokee princess four generations back. Whatever the exact number, it offends enough people to put it off limits as a form of address. Any white person who uses the word injudiciously to a group of Indians can count on receiving a sufficient quota of angry stares.

Even the defenders of the team’s name don’t deny that it’s a personal slur. When NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was asked whether he’d address a Native American as a redskin to his face, he sidestepped the question, replying, “This is the name of a football team.” So did the team’s trademark attorney Bob Raskopf—“That’s not what this case is about. It’s what our word means. You need to put the word in context.”

But when it comes to slurs, “context” isn’t a decontaminant. You assume Raskopf wouldn’t have offered that argument on behalf of a team called the Washington Spearchuckers, however storied its history. But the team argues that their use of “redskin” is really is a separate item that’s free of the stigma that attaches to the word in other settings—it’s “our word,” as Raskopf says—which they’ve always meant purely as an honorific. As the team’s president Bruce Allen puts it, their use of the name “has always been respectful of and shown reverence toward the proud legacy and traditions of Native Americans.”

That line of defense oscillates between the disingenuous and the obtuse. Start with the “tribute” business. Team names can be genuine tributes when they refer to a constituency the team can claim to represent—you think of the Steelers or the Ragin’ Cajuns. But names like Redskin aren’t honoring anybody or anything. They’re meant to evoke people and things known for their savagery or inhumanity—wild beasts, destructive forces of nature, brigands and bandits, ancient warriors, and other assorted malignant beings. The New Jersey NHL team didn’t call themselves the Devils in order to do honor to the Prince of Darkness.

In modern times, of course, the point of those names isn’t to actually terrify opponents so much as to create spectacle and to sell gear with cool logos. As the historian J. Gordon Hylton recounts, the Redskins’ founder George Preston Marshall deserves a lot of the credit for inventing modern mascot pageantry. Marshall was an unapologetic racist of the old school—he was the last NFL owner to integrate his team, and then only under threat of losing his stadium—and it isn’t surprising that he made the name the occasion for a kind of minstrelsy in redface, complete with marching bands in headdresses, cheerleaders in Indian costumes, and a halftime show featuring a leggy Indian maiden dancing with someone dressed as a horse. Marshall even had his players take the field wearing war paint while the coach stood on the sidelines in a Sioux headdress.

Some of the more buffoonish features of those spectacles were retired over the coming decades; by the 1980s, the lyrics of the team’s fight song, written by Marshall himself, no longer contained the line “Scalp ‘um, swamp ‘um, we will take’um big score….” But the plot hasn’t changed: The song still begins with an apostrophe to “braves on the warpath.”