I was talking to my boss today, and I referred to the medical journal she’s in charge of as a magazine. The room went quiet. Everybody froze, until they all turned and trained their eyes on me. The piano player stopped playing. A record scratched. “We don’t use that word here,” I was informed. “Never, ever use that word.”  

If you want a good picture of what happened, imagine if I had dropped the N-word in the middle of an NAACP meeting.