Last night during Glee, there was a public service announcement condemning the use of the R-word, retarded. A few nights ago during the Eastern Conference Championship, Joakim Noah, Chicago Bulls center, called a fan the F-word, faggot. He was subsequently fined $50,000 by the NBA. I don’t think I need to explain the N-word, but in 2006 Michael Richards called a heckler the N-word, nigger. It was caught on video by a cell phone. Basically, Richards career is over.
All of these words are considered slurs. The F and R words appeared to become slurs because they are used to describe people in a negative way, even though they aren’t mentally handicapped or homosexual.
So what are the next words that will replace these words, and will subsequently become politically incorrect to use?
I’ll throw out one. I think trailer house and connotations, trailer trash, will eventually be declared as slurs against the poor. The industry that makes trailer houses already has purged those labels from their marketing and venacular. They are manufactured homes.
And what about tree huggers as slurs against environmentalists?
It’s an insult, obviously, but it’s not a slur on any specific group of people. This is actually kind of an interesting question. Nothing is leaping to mind for me, though. “Retard” is rude when used as an insult but not that many people consider it a slur on all people with learning delays and things.
Perhaps name changes are in the offing for a certain Irish dance, those big cats from Maine, and one of the suits in a deck of cards and a type of little shovel.
I’m sorry, but this one bugs me. Retarded is not in the same league as ‘faggot’ or ‘nigger’. Those two have no purpose other than to slur and to lessen groups of people who are not deficient in any way. ‘Retarded’ - has other uses (‘The progress on the project was retarded by external factors…’) and is a term that DOES designate an actual deficiency.
I am not advocating that people with mental disabilities should be freely and frequently labeled as ‘retards’ - that’s disrespectful. The word has acquired connotations of contempt. However! Like its sister terms ‘moron’ and ‘imbecile’ and the rest, it is useful to have synonyms for ‘stupid’. So if I am frustrated with someone’s inability to grasp a concept, I might impugn their intelligence as an expression of that frustration with ‘moronic’, ‘imbecilic’ or, yes, ‘retarded’.
I mean, we can all recognize that we shouldn’t call someone with a physical handicap a ‘cripple’ because it’s disrespectful, but neither should someone be excoriated for saying ‘They took the best features out of the software before it’s release, so it’s really crippled by the lack of functionality.’
I see these kinds of hyper-PC crusades as equivalent to the parents who’ve complained about the red mistake marks on their student papers making their precious flowers feel bad. Because seeing the red marks hurts their feelings! Well, it’s not the color. They’d feel bad about the marks no matter what color they were - because the mark indicates an error or deficiency. If teachers start using purple marks for errors - well, guess what? Twenty years from now, they’ll complain about the teachers using purple marks.
Maybe one could argue that we shouldn’t have labels for such things at all, because labels are hurtful - but I call bullshit on that. What’s our alternative going to be when ‘mental disability’ becomes taboo? At what point do we actually educate people about mental disability and work to eliminate prejudices instead of jumping at the shadow of an adjective?
" I was at my place of non competitive co supportive employment sitting in a neutral environment with several gender non specific co employees. One of them who had a name which might identify the person by their gender and thus wil not be used due to neutrality guidelines made mention of the new automatic doors that may be utilized by those co employees who without in any way limiting or identifying them by physicality or ability might desire to make use of said automatic doors… "
Do you think that fat will be used as an insult or derision towards people that aren’t actually fat, but as a way of demeaning them? Because that’s how retarded and faggot are commonly used.
