Are you implying I'm racist or sexist for using a normal word in it's usual context?

I don't particularly care if a normal word, which is in plenty of dictionaries, is co-opted by a small group of people. My friends won't know this secret meaning, my family won't know that, whatever is on the TV, Radio, or Cinema won't know that.

And now this conversation is completely off topic.

The internet is so hyper partisan that even normal, boring usage of the English language is now weaponised as shibboleths.

I find the concept of calling people out for using terms that are dog whistles quite problematic. By their very nature, dog whistles are terms in widespread innocent use, and as such the majority of the people using the term will using it in its ordinary usage in good faith. We shouldn't assume people are using these terms as dog whistles unless we have some other evidence to suggest that.

Interesting. Could you suggest how to rewrite that comment and express that a person noticed something (in the literal sense of the word) without using a dog whistle?

Interested to know this as well. I am not sure if pointing to a definition on Urban Dictionary with ~100 thumbs is enough to redefine a word let alone assume that the average person is using it as a dog whistle.

It occurred to me that...

I realized that...

I became aware...

That's without even looking for a thesaurus. Not that I'm supporting this alt-definition of noticing, but your question seemed pretty trivial to answer.

Thanks, that does answer the question I wrote, however my point was that I'm very uncomfortable with this environment where any innocent word could be interpreted as a dog-whistle, and was curious if any "notice" synonyms are also considered dog-whistles.

Then it's 5 seconds before all those are "bad words" too.

Maybe it's better to assume that most people in the world aren't evil degenerates unless there's hard evidence to the contrary.

Welcome to the "woke" world. You'll be learning a lot about what people totally unfamiliar to you do that you've also done at some point without knowing it. We're all sinners in a woke world

What a strange culture we've trapped ourselves in.