The word "retard" is the new "black". There used to
be a different term, (idiot & negro) then the new term (retard & black)
was used to get rid of the less nice term, and eventually, because people who
are rude are just GOING to be rude, and the INTENT gets married with the term,
the new pc term is interpreted to be insulting, even though it's just a
technical description. Black is just a
description of race, not an insult.
Retard means stunted, and it was around BEFORE people decided it was the
new pc term for idiot.
It's 'lacking critical intellectual thought' to assign racism or
debility intolerance to everyone who uses a word just because people who ARE
like that use that word too. Besides, any
new term you choose to describe people WILL be used by rude people to be rude
and intolerant, and eventually, your new word will be an
"insult". Say you pick
“challenged” as your new ‘nice’ way to describe people whose mental growth is
retarded. Once it becomes common
vernacular, rude people will just use the word challenged when they want to
insult challenged people (though, more likely, when they want to insult non
challenged people). You can't win by
policing the WORD people use, because you can’t take a person’s intent away.
This is especially important to recognize because, for some reason,
people are suddenly not allowed to use the ‘not cool right now’ word for OTHER
applicable things. If you say “retarded”
about some thing, idea, or circumstance you find to be stunted in intellect, or
not matching your expectations of being well thought out, efficient, or
productive, you’re interpreted as insulting challenged people, when you weren't
even talking about them!
The fact is, we have the right to find things to be personally
undesirable. Opinions are a right. If having less mental capacity is
undesirable, then that language is going to be automatic, and when I make a relationship
with that word, and I use it to describe something that I find to be
undesirable in the same manner, that does NOT mean that I hate people with
lessened mental capacity or that I feel they deserve ridicule, disrespect, or
any other bad treatment because of their situation; that would be retarded.
Now there's a subtle difference with other words and insults that I
don’t want to be missed or misinterpreted.
Gay used to mean happy. Then it
meant homosexual, then, because it meant homosexual, and people are assholes,
it started to mean ‘not cool’. It never
meant anything negative before the bigots got their hands on it. If you use gay to mean not cool, you’re being
insulting to people who still use the word gay as a valid description of their
sexuality, but only if you meant it that way.
Plenty of people are just going with the flow of vernacular, and are not
actually saying it’s not cool to be gay.
SO, saying “gay” to mean something bad CAN BE an insult, and saying
retarded to mean retarded is JUST a description, unless someone is being mean
TO a mentally challenged person. It's
the intent that makes it an insult, not the word.
Another subtle difference is that even though people have the right to
have negative feelings about gayness, just as they have the right to have
negative feelings about lessened mental capacity, there is an inappropriate
moral judgment of other people's BEHAVIOR that comes with a negative
association with homosexuality that does NOT accompany a negative association
with a mental handicap. No one is judging
a handicapped person as being immoral or saying that they should not be that
way because they are doing wrong. In our
zest for a world free of insults, we're forgetting to distinguish between an
inappropriate moral judgment, and a simple recognition of an undesirable state.
In the end, think about what your words MEAN before you speak, and hear
what the people you’re talking to MEAN instead of just the word. \ /,,
