Slurs are expressions that degrade a certain group of people due to their membership in the group. For instance, slurs such as ‘boche’ degrade people due to their nationality, slurs such as ‘chink’ degrade people due to their race, and slurs such as ‘faggot’ degrade people due to their sexual orientation. In the literature there are two rival theories regarding the question of how exactly slurs derogate members of a certain group, semantic and pragmatic theories. According to semantic theories, pejoratives degrade due to their content, while according to pragmatic theories, derogation is a matter of what is conveyed with the utterance of a slur, rather than with its content.  In my talk I will argue that the behaviour of slurs in indirect speech reports speaks in favour of a pragmatic theory of slurs.