[quote=Imperfectionist]
And again, with barbarian: the original Greek word (barbaros) means "not a citizen", or "not a Greek", someone (in their eyes) uncivilized and wild, who lives on the fringes of civilization, or has none at all. D&D barbarians... are just that. They're illiterate, they are supposed to come from mostly tribal backgrounds rather than growing up in cities among more civilized folk, and thus completely fulfill the original meaning of the word. There's nothing wrong with that. Really, in English, in 2014, the word barbarian means "guy with a broadsword screaming in rage and chopping heads", ala Conan, WAY more than it means "foreigner who talks funny," making it entirely justified as a neutral title rather than a negative insult. Besides, "someone who doesn't speak Greek" is just as much an observation as "someone who has darker skin than me", so your view of the word as an incorrigible insult in the first place is shaky at best.[/quote]

That was not an insult. Note, again, my use of the word 'slightly' regarding the use of the word paladins. The stretch from the notion of the historical paladins to the fantasy type draw on the same basic idea.
The actual people the term 'barbarians' was applied to weren't, though. That's a bit like saying the actual people were 'illiterate mindless savages'; it's as respectful as the Lone Ranger and Wild Westerns are to actual Native Americans. It carries a lot of implications and creates a lot of cultural damage to those people.

There was no such thing as a 'broadsword' until about the 17th century. Broadswords are a modern word and apply to several types of swords basically only from the Victorian period onward. What people often imagine are longswords, bastard swords, arming swords and/or a spatha type.

Also-no, the Greeks and Romans weren't so much racial bigots as cultural bigots.More than once, they were openly accepting of members of other races so long as they were from a Roman background, yet not for people more closely genetically related to them yet from a 'barbarian' culture. They term barbarian implied that anyone from a different culture was innately lesser than them; the entire intent behind the word from its very creation was as a bigoted slur-and the use of the word (alongside how the peoples who were targeted by the term are often presented) in modern times often implies that they were right. Paladin I was pointing out as semantics and the term isn't harmful or even far off; [i]barbarian[/i] is taking a racial slur and making it hip.

As for Dange-because he basically did to Christian myth what Disney did to German fairy tales. He outright made up a lot of his stuff, at least half of the specific people in Hell were for petty vendetta's he had and he presented it as practically canonical material-and people believed it and that caused a wide array of negative cultural effects.