I’m presuming that you speak and write British/Aussie English and someone needs to point out that people used to that language know that you can make compound adjectives by hyphenating two or more words. Consequently hate-speech activities are understandable by anybody with a minimum experience in English.

Anyone who goes about saying that any English word is a faux different-mode-of-speech is flying in the face of the way English grammar works! You might, just to help yourself, look up how many words Shakespeare introduced into English and how many he changed the meaning. You might buy yourself an Archaic English Dictionary too, before you trot out American English definitions of what are right and what’s wrong with someone’s writings.

A writer who says—

Dictionary-makers have thus far been rather unconstrained in their freedom to define it exactly as they please.

just doesn’t have any idea at all about the work that goes into defining the meanings of words and establishing the specifics of how the word is used by being able to quote the etymology of it.

What hit me instantaneously wrt “why don’t we hear of ‘hateful speech’ and ‘hated speech’? Why were these more obvious terms overlooked?” is this: ‘hateful speech’: hateful *to whom*? ‘hated speech’: hated *by whom*? Hateful and hated both imply relativity and objectivity. But ‘hate’ is the absolute and root form of the concept; it is not a derivative word. That word does not raise to consciousness any subjectivity or relativity because no party is implied. The word ‘hate’ is absolute and objective, it exists on its own, and when combined with ‘speech’ it provokes no questions in most minds. I think these are the reasons the term was chosen.

I portend a marriage of sorts (after our generation is gone; these things are incremental). A marriage between the official catchphrase ‘hate speech’ and the unofficial term ‘thought crime’. Their progeny will be ‘hate thought’ (probably punishable by incarceration and death in the dystopia to come). It will be the first bastard birth that is lawfully born.

I portend a marriage of sorts (after our generation is gone; these things are incremental). A marriage between the official catchphrase ‘hate speech’ and the unofficial term ‘thought crime’. Their progeny will be ‘hate thought’ (probably punishable by incarceration and death in the dystopia to come). It will be the first bastard birth that is lawfully born.