Let me be real clear: this message board does NOT need conservatives

[Heffalump_and_Roo]

@puzzlegal

Some slurs are allowed in the pit, but even here, they reflect badly on the person who uses them.

It would be helpful to have this list somewhere. People being expected to know which insults are seen as reflecting well on the speaker and ones reflecting poorly on the speaker should be known.

Perhaps you could put this list together, sort of like the bad words list that were forbidden before. My recollection of that list was that universal agreement on the specific words to put on that list did not exist, not by a long shot.

@BigT

But I’d argue that’s because at least partly stupid is not a noun. A better example is moron(ic). Moron is a noun that applies to a single person, but, still, no one self-identifies as a moron.

But, honestly, I’d argue that getting too wrapped up in trying to make rules out of what is acceptable language misses the point. Language is messy. The main thing is just listening to who the term has historically been used to disparage.

Moron was the word that mentally retarded supplanted. It was describing the exact same group of people.

Up until around the 1960s, the terms “moron”, “idiot”, “cretin” and “imbecile” were all genuine, non-offensive terms to refer to people with mental intellectual disabilities and low intelligence.

wiki

Anyone using the words idiot, moron, cretin or imbecile are just using older words for the same group of people who were called mentally retarded, which was the neutral word that supplanted those words when they became derogatory.

In 2010, Obama passed a Bill to take the term “mental retardation” out of laws and government documents and replaced them with “intellectual disability”.

As Colibri points out here, because of the euphemism treadmill, that term will become a negative term as well.

Retard not Ok, but idiot,moron, and stupid are OK on the dope

It’s called the euphemism treadmill and was coined by Stephen Pinker. The article gives good description of how retarded replaced moron, idiot, and imbecile and now is being replaced by developmentally disabled etc.

As long as people consider others with less intelligence to be inferior, the words will continue to cycle and change, but the meaning will be the same.