What weight words carry. *edited*

A couple of days ago a friend sent me a forwarded email joke which I found to be distasteful. (it poked fun at a minority group) So I send her an email saying that I didn't like it. Mostly I was shocked that she would send me something like that, but in retrospect it could be seen as funny, if you're not an overly sensitive twit like I am. She replied and said that she wouldn't send me any more emails like that.
So it made me think of what words can really do and how much weight they actually carry. I think back to the whole kerfuffle with Don Imus earlier this year, and how I felt that it was justified that he lose his job for making a distasteful remark. However after the dust had settled I heard another point of view of a comedian who says that words are words, they don't have to hurt you, and to my shock I agreed with this comedian. Words are words, they're not little floaty things wielding a bat to physically hit you, they don't have to hurt you.
However the uber PC side of me argues that words can carry weight and can foster larger issues, such as hate and bigotry. I remember when I was 10 my mom and I were walking into a store behind a husband and wife of another culture and my mom made a horribly racist comment accompanied by a rude gesture, and as a ten year old I didn't think much of it. I had no idea that what she had done was morally wrong; I remember feeling that I shouldn't laugh, that they are who they are, but I didn't pursue the issue, I was 10. Now when I think back I see that those words were weighted, heavily, I was an impressionable child and at that point I could have learned hate. (now this isn't to say my mother is hate filled, she believes what she does and I'm not going to discuss it now) I also think of my father growing up and some of the racial slurs he would unleash in my and my brother's presence. For some reason none of that bigotry stuck with me, but it did to my brother, and he still uses some of those slurs in his everyday language. He learned it as a child, and now he uses those words without thought, not always in malice but they do have negative connotations. Should they be viewed as hurtful? It's not like my dad taught him to seek out people of a different ethnicity and beat them with a tire iron.
That is my conundrum, if words and slurs are part of your vernacular are they hurtful? Are we as a culture sometimes overly sensitive to words, are we giving too much power to them? Shouldn't we give them no thought like we were taught to do with the school yard bully? To expand on the question, at what point do we stop and let a word be a word? For example the politically correct term is little person, it used to be dwarf, and before that midget, now short stature is becoming more acceptable. When does it end, or really how do we keep up with what is acceptable? What about retarded? That used to be a perfectly acceptable term and now it's not, we must use developmentally challenged.
Now I do understand that context can carry a message, making the words weightier, but still they are not wielding a bat; sticks and stones, right? So here I am, torn, I have always believed that we should always honour what someone or some culture prefers, however sometimes it's a full time job to keep up with what's acceptable and what's not. Personally I will always choose to keep up with what is correct and what isn't, and if I make a mistake I will apologize, and I'll teach my children the same. But to what extent? Where's the line in the sand? Am I short, or am I vertically challenged? Should the line only go as far as to protect ethnicities and cultures? What if I'm truly offended by being called short?
What do you think?


Edited, check this out. It is an example of being overly PC in my books.