I’m a single parent and I’ve been working damn near 7 days a week for over a month. I have not been on here as much as I normally am. I’ll ask Ed to cut my pay in half.
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.
Helicopter actually.
Ignorance fought. I admit that like the fish, with their little barbels. I will now read up on the Hughes OH-6 Cayuse.
Yeah but we like chopped liver too.
Look-It’s a mod pâté party!
What are your feelings on the suffix form?
Pleading guilty of Posting While Old, but what does “tard” mean? Why is it so bad? What protected class is offended by it? Has it something to do with bastardy?
According to the clip in the OP, if the usage is “retired”, do our Ozark posters need to assure us that they do not pronounce that word “re-tard”? Oops, did I just offend another protected class, hillbilllies? It’s so hard to keep up with these things if you don’t read your Facebook Newsfeeds.
Wow.
“Retarded” (like ‘moron’ and ‘imbecile’) was once a legitimate term used to describe people with mental disabilities. It has since become a pejorative and is no longer used in scientific literature or official classifications (such as in schools).
It has not, nor has it ever, been specifically a word used to insult hillbillies.
Regardless how moderation decisions are handled here at the boards, use the term “retard” or “X-tard” out in the real world at your own risk.
As insult, it is not new. The trend to not offend innocent people by taking their attributes and turning them into an insult (see, gay) is hardly the product of Facebook and hardly new.
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.
I do wonder sometimes if it’s more useful just to let people who can’t debate honestly and intelligently to identify themselves by saying the stupid things they say - of course, the noise sometimes makes all debate impossible, but on balance, I feel like name-calling ought not to be banned - it’s useful in figuring out who isn’t worth listening to.
Yes, I’ve heard the word retard, but I didn’t realize it had risen to the level of the N-word such that it is impermissible to use any word that even resembles it. One has to be on the cutting edge these days to know what terms are permissible for protected classes. As Ross Perot discovered, even the second person pronoun is a pejorative.
My reference to hillbillies was not to identify them as retards, but because “retard” is how they pronounce “retired”, a fate some one said ought to befall the “x-tard” complex. Sorry that sailed over your head.
as a disabled person … I can remember when it was an actual medical term until the ADA passed and all of a sudden official language changed everywhere…
Now if it was that easy for people in general …
Probably around the time I left high school, mid-80s, both gay and retarted as derogatory terms was falling out, so it’s hardly a new phenomenon. I’m not sure why you’re comparing it to the N-word, since no one else is, but yes, it’s considered extremely rude and a pretty lousy thing to say.
Why that would be considered a bad thing is beyond me. There are plenty of ways to insult people left, if need be.
“Tard” doesn’t merely resemble “retard,” it’s a shortened form of the word.
Only if you consider “being on the cutting edge” to have been paying attention sometime within the past 50 years. “Retard” was an insult when I was in grammar school in the 1950s.
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.
Note also that this thread rolled along nicely for eleven posts before any reference was made to the word “retard”.
Because it didn’t occur to anyone to explain the obvious.
It seems like you’ve been educated despite your best efforts. That’s good, right? Because the thrust of your complaint seems to be that it’s just Too Dang Hard to keep up with which words are considered hurtful and have become socially unacceptable. Consider yourself forewarned and forearmed.
No, more like the thread rolled along for eleven posts before anybody bothered to use the full word since it was so glaringly obvious what everyone was talking about.
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?
I have no problem getting what this thread is about-variations of the word “retard”.
Are you still uncertain?