It’s not a word I use and if I hear my daughter (10) or her friends using it, I ask them not to. I remind her of what it actually means. And I remind her she has an adopted uncle who is moderately “retarded” as a result of being locked in a closet and starved as a toddler AND a friend from school who is as a result of a birth injury.
To use it to signify that someone or something is “stupid”, as it is used by the tween/teen crowd, IS, imo, a slur. Exactly in the same way using the word “gay” to indicate some negative characteristic is.
My son’s high school has a tolerance club which hands out cards printed with “Did I just hear you say, 'that’s so gay?” and a long list of other words to use instead which actually MEAN what gay is being used to signify. Would be a great idea to have one for the word “retarded” as well, imo.
Either use it to indicate someone who actually has a mental disability (retardation) or to indicate some other process which has been “retarded” (flames, yeast growth, whatever). Using it to indicate someone or thing which you consider “stupid” or a “moron” is improper and hurtful.
Again, sort of like using “gay” to indicate a homosexual person OR a happy state of mind/environment, NOT something which is “lame”, “stupid”, “insipid” (where IS that damn card?:p) etc…
It IS the “person” being condemned…WTF? You can’t separate a PERSON’S sexuality or race or mental disability from their PERSONHOOD, as if it’s some distinct quality bearing no relation to THEM. :dubious:
And who are you or anyone else to declare that having a mental disability is inherently “bad”? Consider that many have (and still do) consider being gay or black “bad”…and that due to discrimination and slurs from those with such attitudes, gays and blacks have experienced some less than desirable qualiity of life over the years. What about the idea that a PERSON who happens to be mentally disabled (something which cannot be “cured” anymore than gayness or blackness) lived in a society in which their condition, that aspect of their personhood, WAS treated as a “neutral quality” and not some awful, pitiable state and the touchpoint for slurs?
It can even be argued that this aspect IS “admirable” in some ways (talk to the parents of a Down’s Syndrome child sometime if you doubt some see it this way).
Bottom line, we are physical, mental beings and all the aspects you list are part and parcel of the beings who exhibit them. Impossible to distinguish between the person and the trait as you propose, and you are making an arguable judgement call by deciding which are “good” and which “bad”.
On the one hand, many people clearly are offended by using “retarded” where one might otherwise use “stupid”. In this sense, the word is undeniably offensive.
On the other hand, I don’t particularly feel bad using the word in that manner, anymore than I would feel bad using “brain-damaged” to mean the same thing.
On the gripping hand, it is the case that many mentally retarded people have been quite cruelly mocked, and terms such as “retard” and, for some, “retarded” have become so associated with this mocking to the point of being permanently tainted. The innocuous etymology hardly matters; it’s no different than the way any other slur becomes taboo through the associations it develops.
On the other gripping hand, mental retardation is very much an undesirable trait; it is an extreme case of being incorrigibly stupid, to put it bluntly. How can the term not become a hyperbolic (and eventually mundane) insult, same as “lame” meaning crippled and “dumb” meaning mute?
On the fifth hand, it hardly costs anything to just use another term anyway out of deference to those who are sensitive to it.
If you think using a disability (in the sense of some deficit of function versus the standard for humans) to mock someone who is acting as though they had that deficiency is rude, tell me this: do you still call people blind, deaf, lame?
IME people who get all hot and bothered about “retarded” have it segregated into its own special category, with no logical continuity with other disabilities.
Did you read anything I’ve written? It is absolutely literally not the same. Retarded people *are *retarded. Gay people *are not *stupid. The former is tactless and rude but true; the latter is completely inaccurate.
You *can *condemn a quality, especially a negative one, without condemning the person. We do it all the time. Think of your mom. I bet there are things about her that you can’t stand, even if the two of you have a good relationship. Does condemning those aspects of her mean that you’re condemning her as a person?
It means that you can’t function at a normal level. That’s bad. Being naturally stupid is not a good thing. Now, there are many people who are able to lead fairly normal lives, and there are many who have very happy, fulfilled, successful lives. But that doesn’t mean their disabilities are a good thing.
I’ll pose you the same hypothetical I gave upthread. Would you encourage a pregnant woman to drink so that her baby is born with FAS? Would you congratulate someone on being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s?
Many *people *with mental disabilities are admirable. I’ve known people with Down Syndrome whom I liked quite a bit. But their *conditions *are not admirable. Their *conditions *are apalling, and if there were a way to instantly restore them all to a normal level of function, I’d do it.
Since you seem to think a brain that functions sub-normally is great, I look forward to your reports of any attempts to effect such a disability for yourself. Perhaps you could try asphyxia–of course, it could be hard to balance between “enough to get brain damage” and “enough to kill you.”
Gee, and here I thought that the word “disability” means “the lack of an ability.” Little did I know it’s actually a *good *thing to have! Yay for disabilities! Not being able to perform a normal function is such a beautiful thing! There’s nothing bad about that at all!
I’m not really sure whether I use those things as slurs or not, but let’s just assume I do. Let’s say that I do it all the time.
One, that doesn’t entitle me to determine whether or not other people can be offended by that, it just means I’m personally all right with offending people in one way and not all right with offending them in another particular way. Maybe I’m just a dick in general and say incredibly offensive things all the time; I’m not trying to hold myself up as the standard by which some kind of objective offense scale is calibrated.
Two, yes, I do think there’s a difference between “lame” and “retarded.” I do think it’s an entirely different category; not least because brains aren’t analogous to legs or eyes or ears. It’s the difference I’ve been talking about. It hasn’t been part of my experience that the particular impairment of being lousy at seeing, for instance, comes with such a stigma attached that the very accusation can be a vicious insult. I’m completely useless without corrective lenses, and nobody’s ever dismissed me as a person for that. I don’t think a person with mental retardation has the same experience. I think it’s really obvious that s/he does not.
To reiterate, in case I’m wandering from what my point in all this is, I understand why the use of retarded is convenient and attractive in describing things, and why a person using retarded could be doing so entirely without malice toward anybody, or even with malice toward one particular person of normal intelligence. I’m not trying to prove whether or not anybody else should. But I think it’s really shortsighted and often dishonest when people say that either they can’t understand why anybody would be offended, or that nobody else has any reason to be offended that might be grounded in rationality.
You are joking, right? Tolerance club? I could see how that would have gone over when i went to school, mostly just laughing and calling them sissies, pussies, and faggots. But then again, we had a “special needs” class, so “special” was the perjorative of choice rather than “retard”.
I don’t believe I’ve ever said that people *can’t *be offended by the use of “retarded” when not used to mock someone with an actual disability. I’ve just said that it’s *logically inconsistent *and, as such, they shouldn’t try to force others to change their language usage to accomodate their own personal bugaboos.
