Well, yes. And it’s my younger brother so I’m in the habit of putting up my dukes for him automatically and sometimes stupidly. Again, sorry.
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I think people’s “feelings” are often more about getting attention than about actually being offended. Either way, as adults our feeling are our responsibility - not everyone else’s.
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I was speaking of people getting bent out of shape over the use of the word retarded when not directed at the person they choose to project the remark on to.
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He said in a thread where he complained about people being too quick to take offense at “just words,” blithely innocent of any sensation of irony.
LOL! Oh! Okay. I have one of those too. It’ll make him stronger. Swing away!
Did I take offense? Did I express my “feelings” about something?
I don’t believe so. I think you had an irony misfire there - just a little bit.
Yes. Saying “but man people on this forum really do like to dissect every little thing don’t they” isn’t some dispassionate aside, it is plainly a complaint, or in other words, an expression of one’s feelings of dissatisfaction or annoyance.
Honestly, if you can’t take as well as you give, you’re not going to find these message boards very enjoyable.
It’s an observation. I am not annoyed and not complaining. It has nothing to do with hurting my feelings. Not to mention, hurting one’s feelings over the use of a word you’re not directing at them isn’t at all the same thing as being bothered by something I am actually experiencing. Thank you, though, for making my point about overly dissecting every little thing.
“Mental retardation” is still a legitimate medical term, and is used to describe anyone with an IQ below 75.
I believe that number is 70.
And as far as being offended by the term, it’s a never-ending cycle. I believe the term is the “euphemism treadmill”, in which the terms describing these cognitive conditions are considered offensive so are replaced by new, non-offensive terms. However, in time these new, non-offensive terms themselves become considered as offensive by much of society. And so on. It’s the condition itself, not the name given for it, that delivers the insult when used as such.
I think the point is not that it isn’t insulting, but that if it has been distanced from the medical condition, then why the offense? If someone says that John Boehner is a moron, nobody gets upset because his brother has an IQ of 30, and the term is insulting to him.
So, it should follow that if the medical term for this condition is “intellectual disability” then there is no problem with people using retarded, retard, etc. any more than using imbecile, moron, or idiot.
Or must there be a passage of time? Is retarded unacceptable now, or 50 years from now will it be “allowed” as an acceptable insult? And who decides these things anyways?
I have grown personally of late, to the point where I can read this and somehow not make the comment festering in my hindbrain. 
On the IQ scale, a score of 25-50 equals Imbecile.
I really really want it to be true that at some point in time someone filled out an IQ examination, mailed it in, and received an official manila envelope back from somewhere with “Imbecile” stamped all over it.
Apart from being offensive, (and being used as an offensive term makes it offensive), it’s also a technically incorrect term.
It was intended to be an inoffensive way of saying he/she is just slow/behind. Which could be because he/she/you are handicapped. Like a golf handicap, or a racing handicap.
But the term was applied to people who were NEVER going to catch up. Well meaning, but not a meaningful communication. And lying to the parents, while it makes some people feel better some of the time, also makes some people feel worse some of the time.
Worse, calling a person retarded, pretending that they will catch up one day, allows society to pretend that the family of the person doesn’t have a problem, don’t have difficulty, aren’t struggling trying secure a future for a human being that they care about.
So when this came to be used as a generic insult, it wasn’t a term that the industry was trying to hold onto.
It’ll be soon. One of the child psychiatrists I recorded a lecture for said in March that he’s already hearing kids say things like “don’t be so developmental” to mock others.
FWIW, as the term/diagnosis was defined to date, one can be mentally retarded despite an IQ above 70, and one with an IQ of 70 or below may not be mentally retarded.
When I retired from the Army I worked for some years for the State agency here that handled basically the spectrum of (and this was their terminology) MR-DD-MH-SA (Mental Retardation, Developmentally Disabled, Mental Health, Substance Abuse.)
The terminology we used was roughly consistent with the DSM-IV, and it distinguished between Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities (which include Autism Spectrum.) Based on quarterly reports we ran a substantial number of the service consumers had overlapping diagnoses in any case (MH is a catch all for various mental illnesses and a huge portion of those people had substance abuse problems for example.)
But we had knowledge obviously of the offensive way the word “retarded” or “retard” were used. But to say that it’s been inappropriate to use the word “retarded” for extremely long is just inaccurate, until very recently that was the standard. We had started to use “ID/DD” instead of “MRDD” internally, but because of various regulations we couldn’t replace MRDD entirely–although now with the DSM-V I assume it has been or was already replaced.
There is high concern for not offending people in a government agency, and the one I worked at was no different. There was a relatively elegant way they had to avoid offending people while still adhering to requirements to use the term “Mental Retardation.” Basically the position was, and this was something you had to adhere to in all written communication especially, is a person is not synonymous with a diagnosis. You can say a person “has an MR diagnosis” or perhaps even “is an MR consumer” or whatever. But you can’t identify someone as their diagnosis. That went for everything. So you could say “this person with schizophrenia” or “this person diagnoses as having schizophrenia” but you could not say “he’s schizophrenic” or “the schizophrenic”, because that makes the individual person synonymous with the diagnosed condition.
But at the end of the day, there was a big room in the front of the building with tons of large print old photographs dating back to the 1800s. Most of them were pictures of old school State psychiatric hospitals and because they were historical photos you saw lots of terms on the signs for these old buildings, “Imbecile” “Lunatic” “Insane” etc. The reason those words were replaced with other words is because people started using them as insults, and there is no real way you fix that just by perpetuating the policy of refreshing the word whenever it reaches a critical mass of use as an offensive term.
I’m perplexed by the question. That’s when it’s most offensive. Do you think that calling someone a “spaz” is okay if they really have cerebral palsy? Both of these words are least offensive when they are used as playground insults.
Pinker on the euphemism treadmill: http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_04_03_newyorktimes.pdf