Don't say that's retarded, it hurts special kids feelings NOT ABOUT CALLING SPECIAL KIDS RETARDED

[Thaluikhain]

A scenario:

You overhear two teenagers talking:

A: "Mr Teacherson gave us homework right before the school holidays!"
B: "That's gay - no one's going to do that homework!"

Now again, but different.

A: "Mr Teacherson gave us homework right before the school holidays!"
B: "That's retarded - no one's going to do that homework!"

---

In the first example, the word 'gay' is being used as one might say 'lame', 'crap', 'unfortunate', 'a bother', etc. Homosexual connotations may not have even entered your mind.
In the second second, the word 'retarded' is being used because it means stupid to the point of seeming like a mental disability. The word is, at least I find, pretty inseparable from the insulting connotations to a certain group of people.

This isn't to say that saying 'gay' as a bad thing is fine (it makes you sound rather childish), but that the two comparisons you gave are pretty...well, incomparable.

It doesn't matter if they didn't literally mean homosexual, they are using the word for homosexual to mean something bad. It might not be as direct as using retard to mean stupid, but the attitude that there's something wrong with it has to still exist.

 

[rob_simple]

I have an uncle with Downs, and I still call my friends --and myself-- a spastic whenever we fuck up. The thing is, when I'm calling someone a spastic I'm not saying, 'lol let's kill disabled people' because the term is now removed from people with learning disabilities and accepted as a colloquialism for stupidity.

The thing that annoys me about this is I guarantee most the people who have a problem with words like 'retarded' wouldn't hesitate to call someone 'dumb,' even though that used to be a medical term for those unable to speak. Just because it's been out of the medical lingo for so long and is now accepted as common parlance, no one bats an eye at a film called Dumb & Dumber, but Retard & More Retarded? There'd be fighting in the damn streets.

There is no such thing as an offensive word, context is what makes it offensive. Would I say spastic around my uncle? No, but I wouldn't talk about hymens around my gran, either. I say 'what up niggas' to my friends, as a term of endearment, even though we're all white, but I wouldn't say it around black people because it could be interpreted as a racial slur.

That being said, if I had a black friend who knew me well, I know he probably wouldn't mind me saying it, because he would know there was no malice attributed to it.

I admit people are too quick to use the whole 'it's political correctness gone mad' line when they want to get away with saying something offensive, but it doesn't mean we should tar everyone with the same brush and assume that we all use these words to incite hatred or get a reaction.

 

[Tropicaz]

Idiot started out meaning a mentally handicapped person, yet that word now happily sits in the English language as a normal day-to-day word. Dont see why people are so opposed to 'retarded' having the same movement into a general, mild insult alkong the same lines as idiot.

 

[Dogstile]

I actually tried to cut back on my usage of the word spaz when around a friend who is legally a spastic. He told me that he knows I don't mean it in a horrible way to him so he doesn't care.

Bottom line, make sure who you're around is ok with it first. If you're not sure, shut up.

 

[Thaluikhain]

It doesn't matter if they didn't literally mean homosexual, they are using the word for homosexual to mean something bad. It might not be as direct as using retard to mean stupid, but the attitude that there's something wrong with it has to still exist.

Eh words evolve. Hell, Gay meant happy before it meant homosexual, it has just evolved again, just some people who are slow to adopt a new lexicon

Certainly. In this case, however, gay is still the word used to describe gay people (funnily enough). Should the word lose that meaning, should people forget it ever had that, then yes, it could be used as a generic insult without homophobia, though that's the whole point.

 

[JimB]

Why do we need to call them special? What's with these blanket terms? Why can't they just be a person that has Down's Syndrome, or a person that has autism?

Because mental diseases and defects occupy a strange place in American consciousness; they're considered shameful and not to be talked about casually except through euphemism, as to avoid embarrassing anyone having, exposed to, or referred to in the conversation.

"Damn, that's one faggy *****," means something along the lines of, "Whoa. That's one self-centered drama queen with horrible taste in everything." Does that mean that I refer to homosexuals? To me it doesn't.

Your argument here seems to assume that I am required to ask you what each word in any of your sentences means because you want to use words in ways they are not generally accepted as meaning. You therefore want to use words in ways that actively hamper understanding your meaning, which defeats the purpose of having language at all; never mind that you do it apparently all for the sake of making it okay to use pejorative slurs.

 

[Terminal Blue]

I praise the Nobel Prize Winning Scientist - they're the exemplars of our species in my opinion - and it's difficult to not then take that attitude and frown upon the poor person who really struggles with 10 + 10 = 20.

The thing which helps to remember, perhaps, is that it's highly possible (even probable) that neither is neurotypical.

I'm not neurotypical. I test in the top 1% for cognitive ability, but my parents were told as a child I would never be able to climb stairs or eat with a knife and fork. I can do both, it's very difficult to predict the course of these things. But back to my point.

Human brains are not all the same. If they were, we would all be the same, and we're not. As my neurologist once put it "I suspect that the only reason we can continue to believe that there is such a thing as neurotypicality is because we currently can't look deep enough into how the brain works".

Humanity is not limited to a particular type of neurological structure, if it was, we'd be throwing out a lot of those great geniuses and people who changed the world.

Moreover, any of us can become a person who struggles with 10 + 10. A nobel prize winning scientist can still develop a brain tumor, dementia or suffer head trauma. Scary as it may be to think about, our thoughts and consciousness are generated by an organ in our bodies, damage or change that organ and whatever gifts we have can be lost very quickly. Perhaps this is why some people find those with learning difficulties so hard to accept, and what they're actually struggling with is the unconscious notion that the same thing could happen to any of us at some point in our lives.

I strongly advise you (or anyone) to spend time around people with severe learning difficulties. In my experience at least, it's been quite humbling and leads to a lot of perspective.

 

[drisky]

I never understood why watching your language is such a big deal. Referring to considering how your words affect others as "B.S.". As if high schoolers calling everything retarded is protecting the english language. You don't need to say it so just choose another word, its not that hard.

 

[Fappy]

I throw around just about every slang word in the urban dictionary when I am around my friends, but I tend to mind what I say around those I don't know well. When I use these words I don't aim to belittle or hurt people, in fact the humor is generally rooted in either satire or absurdity. I'm belittling the teenagers who yell "RETARD!" at crippled people on the street, not the person with the actual handicap.

 

[Church185]

I personally don't use "gay" or "retarded" as an insult, and I shame my 13 year old sister for using "that's so gay" as filler in any kind of conversation. But, I also think that people are becoming too PC. Yes I understand that people get harassed, and have these insults thrown at them. I lived through it, throughout middle school and my first year of high school people thought I was gay and I live in the Bible Belt portion of the USA so it got rough. But people think that all instances of these words should be done away with, even amongst friends or people who don't mean it as malicious towards a particular group of people.

Some even go so far as to suggest legislating what you can and can't say because it may be insensitive. That ranks right up there with passing legislation that forces people to abide by religious morality on my long list of "Why the hell would you do that?"

In short, yes it can be hurtful towards people with disabilities and people shouldn't do it, but people need to quit getting up in arms about what people have to say. It is a fad right now, just like I don't hear so many instances of people saying something is gay, with a little time people using retard as an insult will fade from the collective's mind and they will find a new word to misuse.

 

[Phasmal]

I try not to use `gay` or `retarded` as insults.
Annoyingly, I'm around so many people who say those things that sometimes it slips out and I have to bang my head on my desk for a few minutes.
I see no problem with cutting back on using words that might upset people if there are other perfectly good words that won't.
TBH I wish the guys I game with would stop saying `rape` so fucking much, it makes me want to puke in their mouths.

 

[BrainWalker]

It's kind of funny that you wrote this post, and your avatar is a black guy. There's certainly no parallels there, no sir!

 

[Church185]

TBH I wish the guys I game with would stop saying `rape` so fucking much, it makes me want to puke in their mouths.

This. Why is this a verb that we use so much in the gaming community? It drives me crazy, and doesn't do our community any favors when it comes to public opinion.

 

[DevilWithaHalo]

Just remember folks, regardless of what you intend to say, how you say it, or what words you choose to say it with, someone, somewhere, will be offended by it. So you have some choices...

Option A. Say what you want, and offend certain other people by doing so.
Option B. Be careful about what you say, and offend certain other people by doing so.
Option C. Keep your mouth shut, and offend certain other people by doing so.

I know, my post is horribly offensive.

 

[Ashadowpie]

i call my friends/family retarded if they do something stupid but its only in a joking way. my family has a dark sense of humour so it doesnt bother us, it actually makes us laugh. heck, i even call myself a retard sometimes when i do something really stupid.

anther one we say is "Stoop" my dad always says that when someone in the family hurts themselves. again it always makes us laugh.

as for mentally disabled people and me caring, im on the dark side with that one and i have a very annoying learning disability to boot. figure that one out.

 

[Wolfeyes555]

Maybe I'm bias because my uncle is very special needs, but I've never been comfortable using the word retarded and even less comfortable with hearing other people hurl it around like an insult. Though I'm not part of the PC police tend not to get into peoples faces about this sort of thing, there was one time that kind of got to me. I was talking to a friend of mind about my grandpa's love of motorcycles and mentioned that he drove one to work everyday and they shouted out (note: they're kind of a safety nut and this conversation was brought up because they were going on about the dangers of motorcycles) "He's retarded!" Now, they've used retard as an insult before, but this time around I just had to call them out on it because, one, that's my grandpa they're talking about and, two, that's the grandpa who is diligently looking after said special needs uncle from before.

Anyway, I guess where I'm getting at in this story is that while you might not think it's that big of a deal, it might be a big deal to someone else.

 

[templar1138a]

As someone with a mental disorder, here's where I stand.

I have no issue with the word "retarded" as an insult. I myself use it to refer to anything idiotic someone has done that seems to lack common sense.

What I have a problem with is the word "retard." In my view, where "retarded" can be used as a way of describing a certain type of stupidity, "retard" is too often used as a hostile and ignorant label by bullies. Not to mention that - in terms of American English - it feels like it has a similar origin and hateful attitude behind it as a certain racial slur I will never say or type. You know, the one that came from ignorant southern pronunciation of the Spanish word for black (I would type that, but I don't how sensitive the mods are).

 

[BrotherRool]

The words not important, you lose nothing by not saying it, so don't. It's got a lot of negative connotations, it is used to make fun of kids with learning difficulties and it's invaded our pop culture enough that a speaker used it at a Paralympics event without thinking about how insanely stupid that is.

If you're picking battles over stupid stuff like this and particularly want to say this one word, why? If you're getting offended that someones suggesting a language habit you've grown up with might not be the best thing, then stop being offended.


Maybe it doesn't hurt people's feelings. But I don't think there's any evidence from you post that you've got the experience with the type of people who would be hurt to know either way. So maybe you're right and maybe you're wrong and if you're right and yet you stopped calling things retarded, you know what happens? Jack shit.