Feeble
I’m gonna guess the mentally challenged will object. If their vocabulary permits.
Mine is in the thesaurus paste list: inadequate; however for lame I think woefully inadequate is equivalent.
Naive
Tell easily-offended folks their recreational outrage is retarded, and results from a desire to self-aggrandize by correcting those less able to feel the pain of others.
The only thing more irritating than an ordinary language pedant is a self-appointed political corrector taking upon himself the hurt of the world. These folks promote the notion that those genuinely handicapped in some way are so emotionally incompetent that they cannot distinguish between usages meant to offend and innocent usages meant to convey meaning.
Oh…the substitute word for “lame” you are looking for is “crippled.”
“That idea is so completely crippled.”
oops
Whoa, slow down there, brother (sister?). At one time, the “N word” was accepted language. Similarly, people (myself included) would describe something like an effeminate-sounding telephone ring choice as, “That’s so gay.”
These are no longer politically correct, but at the time they were still widely used and their political correctness was being questioned, those questioning that would have been in the group you describe as, “self-appointed political corrector taking upon himself the hurt of the world”.
I understand the point you’re trying to make, but disagree with it.
I kinda like “embarrassingly counter-intuitive,” myself.
For this example, I’d snip that down to “embarrassing.”
That’s why we’ve started referring to my wheelchair-bound sister-in-law as “gimpy.”
Your entire argument is a strawman, as no one argues use “lame” is wrong because anyone doesn’t know the difference. Furthermore, what you are saying here is just as self-aggrandizing. It’s tooting your own horn about how you don’t let the offense of others temper what you say.
How about “halt”?
As in “The halt and the lame”.
Used as a verb: To walk with a limp.
“Your boss expects you to work on Christmas? That’s just bullshit, man!”
The difference is that “gay” is not objectively bad. It is reasonable to complain about people using it in a pejorative way. Similarly, “nigger” carries with it a lot of negative baggage, to put it mildly. Using either of those terms in a negative fashion is not politically correct because it implies there is something wrong or bad about being gay or black, which itself is no longer politically correct.
“Lame”, “retarded”, “weak”, etc. are all objectively bad things, and it is ridiculous to try to deny that. Therefore it is somewhat oversensitive to complain about using them as negative adjectives.
Or has political correctness gone so far that we must now pretend there is something positive about being weak, retarded, disabled, etc.?
Somewhere, someone would object on their behalf, I’m sure.
I recall Mrs. Huxtable using the term “sorry” in this sense on The Cosby Show.