I just heard on MSNBC that Rush Limbaugh used the word “retarded” several times on his show yesterday. I can’t wait to hear Palin’s denunciation of Rush and her demand that he be fired.
The problem is that these insults aren’t remotely comparable.
With “faggots,” you have gay = bad. With “niggers,” you have Black = bad. With “retarded,” you have stupid = stupid. The other slurs being mentioned all involve ascribing traits to a class of people that they don’t necessarily have. In the case of “retarded,” you’re just calling a spade a spade. It’s a particularly blunt and tactless spade, but that doesn’t elevate it to the level of homophobia or racism.
Mentally retarded people don’t have the same cognitive abilities as your average person. It doesn’t make them not human, it doesn’t make them not worthwhile, it doesn’t even make them not fun people to hang out with. But it does make them stupid. Really stupid. So objecting to using “retarded” as a hyperbolic way of saying “stupid” is fucking retarded. That doesn’t make it inoffensive, but it does mean that it’s not remotely comparable to slurs based on race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation.
Right, Rahm called her kid a faggy poodle. Very good.
Don’t be stupid.
I can’t use stupid any more?
Okay, don’t be…less than average intelligence.
No?
Don’t be…I give up. Everybody’s wonderful, and everything they do and say is perfect in every way.
(I don’t think what you said was stupid, Louis; just using your post as a jumping-off point. Oh, wait, that trivializes suicide…)
That’s the only thing we’ll be allowed to say if the Democrats get 61 seats in the Senate. 
Yes, the term mental retardation was discarded by the educational community for that reason, I believe.
The proper wording to describe such individuals now is “cognitively delayed”. That one isn’t going to easily roll off the tongue on the playground or in the boardroom, but who knows.
That’s totally D’abled.
ETA: Some people in this thread are being real Cogno’s.
just doing my part to move the euphemism treadmill along smartly
isn’t it, though?
i mean it’s a metric for a certain IQ. which suggests an inability to analyze shit. which means that an idea can “be retarded” in the sense that it would be an idea propagated by a retard, i.e. someone with well below average intelligence.
I liked “sped.” Do people still say “sped?”
I think an analogy might be calling a baseball umpire “blind.” It’s not an insult to the blind. It’s just an opinion that the umpire is behaving as though he has that particular disability.
The Offensive Underground is alive and well! {Raises fist and shakes it around}
how dare you insult the visually impaired.
I like “dumbass,” but that’s not a good descriptor for an idea rather than a person.
I also agree with Diogenes that it’s more like calling an umpire blind.
Is it still OK to call people of less than average height, ‘short’ or should I say ‘vertically challenged’?
why you gotta go and denigrate donkeys like that?
So I guess now we have a test for whether Palin was actually offended, or is simply engaging in a cynically calculated show of poutrage.
This is a particularly brain-damaged bit of political correctness. No, they aren’t “cognitively delayed” – in most cases, they aren’t going to eventually develop normal intellectual capacity if you just give them a little extra time, which is what that phrase means.
I will put even odds on Palin ignoring Limbaugh’s idiocy (is that still an OK term?).
This is such a tempest in a teapot. It is as if we don’t have real issues to deal with.
You’re supposed to call them “midgets.”
A donkey robbed my mother.