# In which forums is the use of "tard" acceptable?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762
**Category:** About This Message Board
**Created:** [May 7, 2018, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762 "2018-05-07T15:44:36Z")
**Posts on this page:** 18
**Page:** 3
### Author:  [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2018, 4:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762/41 "2018-05-09T16:26:12Z")
> [@HurricaneDitka](#):
>
> Or could I refer to Cuomo and “citizen fleet” as “libtard in chief Cuomo and his tard army”?
That’s very offensive! It’s a _navy_.
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### Author:  [@gnoitall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnoitall)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2018, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762/42 "2018-05-09T16:57:59Z")
> [@Morgenstern](#):
>
> Bustards and bastards, custards and costards, leotards and unitards. As you can clearly see, tards are everywhere. It’s bigger than we are.
> Anyone have any mustard?
\*\*Mean Mr. Mustard \*\*might.
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### Author:  [@IvoryTowerDenizen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/IvoryTowerDenizen)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2018, 7:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762/43 "2018-05-09T19:09:41Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#):
>
> I have no problem getting what this thread is about-variations of the word “retard”.
> Are you still uncertain?
Pretty sure **Morgenstern** was just playing around.
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### Author:  [@HurricaneDitka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HurricaneDitka)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2018, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762/44 "2018-05-09T19:36:59Z")
I appreciate the good discussion, and several of the jokes here (particularly the combination of post content and username by **Sailboat** : “It’s a _navy_.”) but I admit I’m still a bit confused about the standard in use in MPSIMS. The two mods said (realizing I’m snipping out a bit of context):
> [@IvoryTowerDenizen](#):
>
> … I don’t like the -tard suffix. I’d be inclined to leave a Mod note…
> [@Loach](#):
>
> … In general I don’t see a prohibition for the word as long as it’s not pointed at a poster as a personal insult. Too much tardiness will probably get the thread moved to the Pit or moderated if it’s a hijack. I’ll give it some more thought.
Those seem like two guidelines that are pretty far apart from each other. Does that mean it will depend on which one reviews reported posts?
BTW, I’m not trying to give any of the mods a hard time, I understand they’re busy and (don’t smite me) not perfect, and that they’re doing the best they can. I guess I’d just like to know if, in the future, I read something like “Trump and his tard army” should I report it? Or not bother because it’s acceptable and is just making extra work for the mods?
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### Author:  [@IvoryTowerDenizen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/IvoryTowerDenizen)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2018, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762/45 "2018-05-09T19:41:17Z")
> [@HurricaneDitka](#):
>
> I appreciate the good discussion, and several of the jokes here (particularly the combination of post content and username by **Sailboat** : “It’s a _navy_.”) but I admit I’m still a bit confused about the standard in use in MPSIMS. The two mods said (realizing I’m snipping out a bit of context):
>
> Those seem like two guidelines that are pretty far apart from each other. Does that mean it will depend on which one reviews reported posts?
>
> BTW, I’m not trying to give any of the mods a hard time, I understand they’re busy and (don’t smite me) not perfect, and that they’re doing the best they can. I guess I’d just like to know if, in the future, I read something like “Trump and his tard army” should I report it? Or not bother because it’s acceptable and is just making extra work for the mods?
This is still being discussed behind the scenes. Sometimes mods disagree on our personal opinions and it take sometime (especially when life gets in the way) to come to a uniform consensus.
I do appreciate your good humor and patience.
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### Author:  [@HurricaneDitka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HurricaneDitka)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2018, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762/46 "2018-05-09T19:43:46Z")
> [@IvoryTowerDenizen](#):
>
> This is still being discussed behind the scenes. Sometimes mods disagree on our personal opinions and it take sometime (especially when life gets in the way) to come to a uniform consensus.
>
> I do appreciate your good humor and patience.
Gotcha, thanks for the reply. Now back to our regularly-scheduled jokes while we await the verdict.
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### Author:  [@BlankSlate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BlankSlate)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2018, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762/47 "2018-05-09T22:39:15Z")
Yes, let’s wait to see if our shiny apple is acceptable or has a hidden wormtard.
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### Author:  [@Morgenstern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Morgenstern)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2018, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762/48 "2018-05-09T23:12:31Z")
> [@BlankSlate](#):
>
> Yes, let’s wait to see if our shiny apple is acceptable or has a hidden wormtard.
I hope they aren’t tardy.
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### Author:  [@Greathouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Greathouse)
#### Post date: [May 10, 2018, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762/49 "2018-05-10T18:58:20Z")
> [@Riemann](#):
>
> It’s a Leo tard.
Before I read what you had quoted I thought you were referring to Loach since he used to be a Law Enforcement Officer, but I guess that would have been an Ex-LEOtard. So, never mind. 😃
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### Author:  [@Ravenman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ravenman)
#### Post date: [May 11, 2018, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762/50 "2018-05-11T20:51:27Z")
> [@jtur88](#):
>
> And a hundred others, like nerd, dork, bum, none which now require mandatory sensitivity training. But others were not insults, including the likes of crippled and Negro.
>
> Not everyone structures their lives in the same way, in order to be knowledgeably uptodate about the trendy fashions of speech or anything else to which one must pay attention.
I don’t get mad at people for using a word that they didn’t know was offensive. For example, several years ago I learned that the term “Hottentot” was actually very offensive to some people. I had no idea before someone said something about it, and I probably had no means of spontaneously knowing that if nobody had said anything.
But now that you and I know that, to persist in using an offensive term is something that doesn’t really have an excuse. Don’t you agree?
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### Author:  [@aldiboronti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aldiboronti)
#### Post date: [May 12, 2018, 2:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762/51 "2018-05-12T14:03:08Z")
> [@hajario](#):
>
> What are your feelings on the suffix form?
:D:D
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### Author:  [@El\_Kabong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/El_Kabong)
#### Post date: [May 12, 2018, 4:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762/52 "2018-05-12T16:44:45Z")
> [@Loach](#):
>
> Helicopter actually.
Hunh, for some reason I always thought it referred to a character played by Dick Bakalyan in the movie _Chinatown_. Ignorance fought.
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### Author:  [@John\_DiFool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_DiFool)
#### Post date: [May 12, 2018, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762/53 "2018-05-12T17:22:19Z")
> [@Ravenman](#):
>
> I don’t get mad at people for using a word that they didn’t know was offensive. For example, several years ago I learned that the term “Hottentot” was actually very offensive to some people. I had no idea before someone said something about it, and I probably had no means of spontaneously knowing that if nobody had said anything.
>
> But now that you and I know that, to persist in using an offensive term is something that doesn’t really have an excuse. Don’t you agree?
Semprini!
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### Author:  [@tim314](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tim314)
#### Post date: [June 1, 2018, 4:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762/54 "2018-06-01T16:43:29Z")
> [@Riemann](#):
>
> It’s a Leo tard.
I used to have a dog named Leo. When we got a second puppy, some of my suggested names (all rejected by my wife) included:
[ul]
[li]Nardo[/li][li]Tard[/li][li]Let’s get two and name them Pold and Loeb[/li][/ul]
Of course the second example above is just a pun on “leotard”, not a reference to anyone’s intellectual abilities. As to the OP, I think both the quoted uses are slurs, and equally inappropriate.
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### Author:  [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)
#### Post date: [June 3, 2018, 3:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762/55 "2018-06-03T03:46:11Z")
> [@Larry\_Borgia](#):
>
> I am in my fifties and I do not believe you have never heard “retard” used as an insult. It was a common insult in the many elementary schools I went to (Foreign Service brat) and has been used in countless movies, books, TV shows and other media. It predates Facebook by decades.
Everyone used it in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It became clearly objectionable only relatively recently.
Now I’ll hop in my Tardis to do more research.
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### Author:  [@Joey\_P](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Joey_P)
#### Post date: [June 3, 2018, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762/56 "2018-06-03T15:47:01Z")
> [@Colibri](#):
>
> As has often been pointed out in this forum, non-moderation of a post, even a reported one, does not justify the conclusion that it is within the rules. A few of us mods actually have lives;), and may have been busy or overlooked the report. Unless a mod has positively made a ruling that something is within the rules, you shouldn’t jump to that conclusion.
I seem to recall it being the other way around. If no action is taken on a reported post, it means it wasn’t actionable.
From a thread asking about how to know if a report was received (because nothing ever happened):
> [@Acknowledging a sent "report"](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/acknowledging-a-sent-report/653739/9):
>
> I think if you’ve sent a report and no action was taken, it’s probably a sure bet that the mod didn’t think any action had to be taken OR the mods are busy discussing the situation.
> [@Acknowledging a sent "report"](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/acknowledging-a-sent-report/653739/15):
>
> As has been said, you can usually assume that the report has gone through, and that if no action was taken we decided none was warranted. (In GQ, it usually means that all of the mods have seen the report and all of us decided to take no action.)
From a thread about responding to reports:
> [@Response to reported post?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/response-to-reported-post/768528/4):
>
> As for regular reports, **BigT** is correct. Normally mods will just take no action at all if they don’t think a report needs action and they will not reply to the reporter because, again, it takes an extra step in order to reply to a report. First you have to copy the email of the poster, you can’t just reply back to the report, because that just gets sent back to the SDMB email. Then you have to create a new email entirely and paste in the poster’s email and then create your own title, etc.
I know I’ve seen other similar posts and I too was under the assumption that if you report something and nothing becomes of it, whatever you were reporting is ‘allowed’.
These are just a few posts I found by quickly googling the board. On preview, I see one of them is from Colibri and directly goes against the Colibri post I quoted.
“Unless a mod has positively made a ruling that something is within the rules, you shouldn’t jump to that conclusion”
and
" if no action was taken we decided none was warranted"
You can understand why, as posters, we get confused about the subject.
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### Author:  [@engineer\_comp\_geek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/engineer_comp_geek)
#### Post date: [June 3, 2018, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762/57 "2018-06-03T22:15:09Z")
If you ever have a question about why something was or was not moderated, you can always send us a message. You can send a PM or an e-mail to the mods of that forum, or you can report the post again asking for an explanation. We generally don’t respond personally to most post reports, since that would take a lot of extra time, and in most cases it isn’t necessary. But if you report a post and ask for an explanation, we usually do respond to those.
If no action was taken, it’s a fair assumption that we thought that no action was necessary. That doesn’t necessarily mean that whatever was reported is perfectly acceptable. We aren’t like traffic cops who ticket every single person who goes 1 mph over the speed limit. Our job is enforcement of the rules, but also to keep threads going as smoothly as possible so that the SDMB is as enjoyable as possible for everyone. Sometimes we’ll be busy and we won’t see a post report until the thread is already on the next page. At that point, we might see the post as a rules violation, but we might see it as minor enough that it’s not worth worrying about at that point. If the report is for a hijack, but the thread managed to get itself back on track all on its own before we had a chance to intervene, we might think that it’s better just to leave it be so that we don’t dredge up the hijack again and potentially derail the thread after it has already fixed itself. That doesn’t mean that the hijack was allowed and that we’ll allow the same sort of thing in other threads.
“We didn’t think that it was necessary to take action in this particular case” and “it’s universally allowed” are not the same thing.
Again, if you have a question about a particular rule or a particular instance of the enforcement (or lack thereof) of a rule, feel free to contact us for clarification.
If you whiz by a cop at 75 mph and for whatever reason he decides not to chase you down and give you a ticket, that doesn’t mean that you have blanket permission to speed like a demon over every road.
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### Author:  [@TBG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TBG)
#### Post date: [June 27, 2018, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-forums-is-the-use-of-tard-acceptable/813762/58 "2018-06-27T21:18:46Z")
> [@BigT](#):
>
> That said, I hate the prefix -tard,
_suffix_ and just think of it as being short for bastard if the retard usage gets you so riled up. It’ll be better for your blood pressure
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