That's the problem. We confuse words for things, and come to think of each symbol as only having one possible meaning.
You tell an American that "say shoe" can possibly mean "it's cabbage" and they act like you're an idiot because, well, "say" can only mean something like "talk" or "pronounce," and you only wear "shoe" on your foot.
You spell it "c'est chou" and they say, "I'm not good at foreign languages." It's because of a narrowed field of vision, a narrow perspective.
What you don't like has been established since the 1920s. What you get are dialect differences and people insisting that their dialect is the only correct dialect. Ill-will, distrust, suspicion, even hatred help fuel the dialect boundaries, which often co-occur with class or ethnic differences in the US. If you just see those US-based boundaries, narrowing your perspective even further. It's trendy and fashionable in some fields to rely on narrow perspectives: The ideology behind them rely on certain assumptions and conclusions, and if those assumptions fail then a lot of intensely, closely held beliefs have to also fail.
What is true is that it's easy to become conditioned to certain words, above and beyond what ill-will and suspicion require. I call you a "zasrannej vole!" and you'd look at me like it's gibberish, and it is if you don't know that language. But if somebody blurts that at me, I'm not much offended even though I know exactly what it means. It has no deep emotional resonance in me. To start with I wasn't offended at all, but I've trained myself by reminding myself it's an insult and I should feel insulted. Since I didn't hear it before I was 35, and don't hear it often at all these days, it's a bleached insult. If you were taught at age 3 that it was an insult and heard it for 20 years, you'd react differently because you were conditioned to.
The reverse is also true. Where I grew up "Jew" was an insult. It was a fighting word. Call somebody a "Jew" and expect at the very least to be told to go fuck yourself, and more often than not to dodge a fist. It had no neutral use, and certainly no positive use. I don't know that I knew anybody Jewish until I was 18, and that was at school in a different state. Lots of Jewish students. They had no trouble calling themselves "Jews", but I couldn't because I couldn't shake my training that "Jew" was an insult. It took me months to be able to actually use the word, because I had too narrow a perspective to realize that other dialects used identical sounding words with subtly different meanings and connotations. I still don't like using it and am one of those say "Jewish people" by default.
By definitions here, I think of "Jew" as an insult. Therefore it is an insult for everybody. Intent doesn't matter. Other interpretations don't matter. It's not a question of "don't take what's not offered"--it's taking what isn't offered and raising it to the level of a virtue. If offense isn't offered, don't take it.
BTW, I have also been called a "Jew" as an insult, not just when I was growing up but by mostly by those Muslims for whom the word is, by default, also an insult and intended to offer offense. While I believe in not taking what's not offered, I also don't think it's always necessary to take what's offered. If offense is offered, it's my choice to take it or not. I'm not held in thrall to symbols, mostly because I know that symbols are just symbols and it's the interpretation that matters. (But that's just the state of knowledge since the 1920s.)
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