Well, there's a difference between "around certain people" and "ever." A friend told me the word "retard" bothered her because of a mentally disabled member of her family, and TBH I still thought it was kind of silly (said member of family is autistic, not retarded, and people using words to describe unrelated things isn't going to change anything), but she wasn't demanding that I stop using it, just saying how it made her feel, so I made a conscious effort not to use it around her, because as it turns out, I'm a piece of work, but I'm not a total monster. I still use it pretty conversationally, and it's slipped out once or twice around her, which I immediately apologized for, but she was really cool about it.

Thing about LJ, though, is it isn't a one-on-one conversation. So censoring yourself around a member of your flist means censoring yourself in pretty much your main public outlet.

Actually, I find all this censorship to be pretty creepy. It seems like in the PC movement, there's one opinion on any given thing, and if you deviate from that, regardless of your rationale, you get dogpiled and verbally abused until you conform, and once you conform, you go around and verbally abuse anyone else who makes that deviation. What it lacks is, well....diversity. Diversity of opinion. The ability to agree to disagree. So I've pretty much picked up my toys and gone home on the whole PC thing. I'm not going out of my way to oppose them, because in spirit, I actually agree with just about everything they're championing! But their methods bug me, so I don't want to hang out with them anymore.