The problem with “bananas” in that context is that it’s the same as “crazy” – a descriptor for crazy people, right? Anyway, I think that “crazy” is pretty removed from the original context and is a very useful word in many contexts. But, that’s not a hill I’ll die on.
I won’t die on the “lame” hill either, of course. I mean, language changes all the time. It’s just that it’s just such a useful word
I think you and others (@Riemann , @MrDibble – others ?) did a great job of addressing this. You have my thanks.
Also, the adjectives I chose for my post describe choices and/or behavior of specific people without casting dehumanizing aspersions on entire groups of people for inborn characteristics beyond their control.
In other words, not being particularly innately intelligent is an inborn characteristic, where being willfully ignorant is a choice. You can choose to challenge your own beliefs and learn.
The word ‘asshole’ works similarly. Calling somebody an asshole for their words or deeds is – as I referenced above – vastly different from attacking them with the slur of “greasy Mexican.”
JFTR, I offer a dictionary definition of troglodyte:
The second and fourth definitions were what I had in mind when I described ‘the worst’ subset of the MAGA types (themselves, a subset of Trump supporters, and a pretty distinct caricature of their own making).
Yeah, I wrestle with “crazy”.
I don’t generally use “lame”, but I don’t have a problem with others using it. I think it’s too far removed from being used to describe people with mobility impairment to be a serious problem.
Same here. I more or less think it’s okay, especially when it’s not used as a pejorative. That ice cream is crazy good.
I’m guessing that everyone is okay with dumb, despite its original meaning of cannot speak? I put lame in that category.
I’ve run across some people who don’t want any disability to be casually referred to. Like fell on deaf ears or turned a blind eye. I think that’s overreach, though.
I use “lame,” because I’ve never met someone who couldn’t walk who objected to that use. And I’ve always said that those who a (potential) slur is used against are the ones who decide. Plus I’ve never quite come up with a good replacement word for the concept. “Uncool” would work, but it (and “not cool”) have evolved to be a form of understatement, and thus are more intense than what I mean by “lame.”
Plus, like “moron” and similar, it seems to me that a lot of people don’t even know that “lame” means “can’t walk,” unless they learned that at church. (And, yes, I do use “moron” and “moronic” where I might have previously used “retard” and “retarded.” Though I never used either one all that often.)
I have, however encountered mentally ill people who object to “crazy,” but it seems far less clear than other terms. Plus it’s a word where I actually have a say. As someone with a mental illness myself, I only personally find it objectionable when it is used about a person.
I do still use it in other contexts, but I’m decreasing my usage. I find words like “wacky” and “ridiculous” or “absurd” work well enough in most cases. But still sometimes “crazy” just fits, like “driving me crazy.” It’s much better than “insane,” and marginally better than “batty.”
I don’t think I’ve ever really used “crazy” as an intensifier, but I don’t really find anything wrong with it.
Nobody thinks that you are saying a Trump supporter is literally an intellectually disabled person either, so this is irrelevant. The problem is not the impact on the target of your insult, the problem is the impact on the archetype of stupidity that you choose for your metaphor. If the metaphor references a troglodyte or a non-human animal, there is no impact because troglodytes don’t exist and animals don’t care. The problem is that intellectually disabled people exist and have feelings. and have historically been treated very badly.
Suppose you are a regular kid, but through some quirk of fate when you are school, you get a reputation for doing dumb things. Some cruel smartass kid at your school then coins the expression to “do a Waldo Pepper” to mean doing something stupid. Whenever anyone does something stupid, it’s “Hey, you did a Waldo Pepper”. Because of this, you are mocked and bullied relentlessly for years. You hate school, you feel dehumanized, you are completely traumatized.
You eventually graduate from high school and go off to college, and you hope all this horrendous bullying is behind you, but you discover that one of the kids at your high school has posted a video online that has gone viral, and “to do a Waldo Pepper” has now caught on as global meme. Now, whenever someone does something stupid anywhere in the world , it’s called “doing a Waldo Pepper”. It’s horrible, embarrassing - not to the person insulted for being stupid, but to you. You are now the global archetype of stupidity. And of course it brings back constant memories of years of dehumanizing bullying at school.
Isn’t “crazy” really the same as “bananas” and “nuts” and other terms for, I don’t know, the mentally unwell? It all makes it seem like being crazy is bad or something?
To be clear, I don’t think using crazy, bananas, or nuts is anything like using “retarded”, because none of those terms were ever medical terms, so I don’t think there’s a need to restrain the use of those.
as someone who is disabled and has put up with this most of my life, I approve of the op…
I do too.
I took a mental first aid course once as training for my job. (It’s something they offered to everyone at my work, I do IT so it’s not like I’m literally talking people off ledges on a regular basis, but anyone can be faced with having to help someone suffering a mental health crisis and being prepared is a good thing.) It was a day-long training and it was fantastic, I learned a lot.
But the person teaching it had some very strong views about the stigmatization of people who suffer mental health problems. He himself had two adopted children with serious mental health issues. It was something he dealt with as a parent on a daily basis. He was very angered by stories that relied on the old trope of “mental illness=evil”, with the villain being someone who victimizes people because of their delusions. At the time, the film Joker had recently come out, and he ranted about that briefly. He pointed out that in the vast majority of cases, a person with mental health issues is the victim, not the victimizer, and that they are people who should be helped, not feared and reviled.
In the same vein, he also had strong feelings about using terms referencing mental illness to describe bad behavior. “That person is insane to think they are going to get away with it.” “That person is driving crazy and will get someone killed.” That sort of thing.
It was the first time anyone really made me think about how we use those labels in a harmful way, and how we take those tropes about “insane supervillains” for granted. I’ve had my struggles with mental health in the past, my mom deals with mental health problems, and my brother’s mental health problems helped lead him into a life of crime (he’s currently in jail, and he’s spent large parts of his life in jail; he’s one of those examples of people who is mentally ill but does victimize people).
I still find myself using terms like “crazy” in the casual sense, though I try to catch myself now and then. I don’t think that term itself comes close to the kind of slur that we’re talking about in this thread, but I might be wrong about that. I am sympathetic to the idea that we very much need to change the way we think about mental illness in this country, from a wide systemic perspective down to a personal one.
I get what you’re saying about mocking and bullying. I get what you’re saying about it being traumatizing. But I’d always thought that “dehumanizing” requires an extra step: something like referring to various people as chimps, say — or referring to them as “primates”, to imply that sort of thing. Or maybe dropping the “imply” part altogether: figure that it’d be dehumanizing to use a phrase that’d have the connotation of “subhuman vermin”, but also that you could flatly refer to them as “subhuman vermin”.
Any of those would strike me as “dehumanizing” in a way that other forms of mockery and bullying don’t quite seem to.
If you’re still focused on this, you don’t seem to get it at all. You’re focused on the impact now on the person that is being insulted now. That’s not the issue, because nobody thinks that calling somebody a chimpanzee is to be taken literally, so it’s not dehumanizing.
And you’ve quoted absolutely the wrong part of what I posted. The critical part of the analogy is when you reach college. You are no longer being directly bullied or insulted, that’s not the problem. But people are still using you as an archetype for stupidity when insulting others. And that brings back all those memories of when you were dehumanized in the past at high school.
I think “dehumanizing” is tangental to the problem with “retard” as a slur. I really think the major issue is that using “retard” as an insult to neurotypical people who do something thoughtless is demonizing/putting down people who are not neurotypical. You are casually and unconcernedly insulting all those OTHER people who aren’t even meant to be your target.
I think a reasonable understanding is “recognized slurs of the current era of society in which we live shouldn’t be used to refer to another poster or even off board person”, I would still say they should be okay in a limited context. Example like if a public figure uses a slur, and we have a P&E thread discussion their use of that word.
“Lame” was closer to a slur long ago, you can find some usage before the 1950s where “lame” and “cripple” not only were used as slurs, but there was even a fairly gross general gist that it was some sort of failure as a human being to be physically handicapped. That gets more egregious the further back you go. However, I think words like “lame” moved in the opposite direction of words like “retard”, no one really uses lame as a slur now, it isn’t regarded as a slur broadly, and people also generally don’t nearly as much denigrate people with physical disabilities as a slight. Certainly on that last point society isn’t perfect in its treatment of the physically disabled, but they aren’t nearly as much a target of scorn and derision as they once were, and I think slurs related to physical infirmity have sort of drifted out of our common usage and made many such terms “more benign.”
Unfortunately both using terms to refer to the intellectually disabled as a slur is still widespread, as is associating someone with being intellectually disabled frequently used as an insult.
If the word will be banned I only request that it be banned explicitly, because I feel like most people in my neck of the woods will not consider “retard/retarded” (used as a synonym for “stupid” or “dumb”) to be a slur or other form of hate speech.
~Max
Yeah. I’m reminded of the episode of “Mad Men” where a guy loses a foot to a lawnmower accident, and they are all standing around afterwards saying, “poor Joe, too bad he can’t work here anymore”.
Today, no one would even imagine firing a guy from a desk job because he lost his foot. We routinely accommodate that sort of disability (literally, lameness) and those of us with desk jobs probably all know or have known a valuable co-worker who has mobility issues.
I don’t think there’s any way that the board would not consider things that way. There is no such thing as a “banned word”, where typing the word gets you in trouble no matter the context. That’s one of the advantages of having no bright line rules; the moderators can always make a judgement call. There is no instance where a moderator will say, “I know the rule is stupid, you clearly didn’t do anything wrong, but a rule is a rule and I am forced to punish you.” This board doesn’t work that way, which is one reason why this board doesn’t suck. 
AKA: The Miller, Naughty Language in the Pit Rule, Exception.
It really is incredible how many people here completely fail to grasp what ought to be a very simple concept: If you compare someone to a specific kind of person with the intent to insult them, what you are actually doing is implying that this kind of person is undesirable. This applies to any kind of person, be they black or gay or Jewish or Mexican or retarded or even blonde or freckled. I grant the last two don’t carry the same weight because these are categories that haven’t had the same history of denigration in society, but it’s still true.
So the question is, if you’re going to insult someone why do you need to bring anyone else into it? Why is it so important that you be able to continue denigrating marginalized people? Are you incapable of insulting someone purely on their own merits and you have to borrow society’s hatred of certain groups?
This is all rhetorical, of course, the real answer is some people will whine and pule over any perceived limitation of their free expression, regardless of how they actually want to express themselves. This leads to absurd arguments like the one above that forcing people to stop saying various words has somehow led to our current problems with bigotry, or that having to adjust the language we use every few decades is an unbearable burden.
“Crazy idea” or “Lame idea” is one thing, but calling someone crazy is usually too far. (However, there is “crazy good”, etc, so there is no way to moderate that word.
I agree we should discourage “retard” as a slur, when applied to a person. I am not so sure about “that’s a retarded idea”, but I am willing to be convinced.
I agree - my thanks to you and others (like @Mr.E in the post above) who clarified this for me (and for others).