Candid discussions around our unthinking use of everyday language have resulted in lots of gradual changes, too many to list all of them.
Please note that the following contains terms that I (now) know know to be offensive, but which I am including for the sake of clarity.
When I was a kid growing up in a quiet and almost entirely white market town in East Yorkshire, everyone would get their takeaway meals from either the chippy or, if they were feeling more cosmopolitan, from the '"chinky". A few years later, as a teenager, my friends and I would talk about people getting "monged" when they drank too much. There was no racist or disablist 'intent' in this use of language. Nonetheless, it was still racist, or disablist. That doesn't mean that everyone who ever said those things is a bad person. It isn't necessarily a big drama. But the world is a little bit better, I think, now that the vast majority people in my home town would say they are getting a chinese meal for their takeaway tea when they don't fancy the chippy (or a curry or a pizza - that choices have also improved!).
It isn't all that tricky. My elderly dad, now in a specialist care home with a range of illnesses including significant dementia, has probably gone back to getting it wrong. His brother (a relatively traditional working class north-eastern bloke brought up in a pit village who worked most of his life for the co-op and became a home owner for the first time when Maggie flogged off the council estate so we aren't aren't talking about some lentil leftie Islington champagne socialist) made the change to talking about getting a 'chinese takeaway' instead, and has stuck with it. Probably only in the last 20 years, once he was into his sixties. Change can happen.
And it's not just about intent.
