“Retarded” And The Language
Posted by Dirty Harry on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
There are words I won’t use — words I won’t use in any context other than to list them as words I won’t use: Nigger, fag, kike, etc… These words were created only with the intent to hurt and dehumanize. There are other words which fall into this category, but you get my point. ”Retarded,” however, wasn’t created with malice in mind. It was created as an alternative to hurtful words like “fool” and ”idiot.”
It seems as though every year shifting, fascistic political correctness criminalizes another word and today it’s “retarded.”
Remember, just a few years ago when the liberal Thought Police criminalized the word “Indian?” ”No, no,” we were told, “The proper term is ‘Native American.’” Funnily enough, rank and file Native Americans didn’t get the memo and overwhelmingly came out in favor of ”Indian” therefore missing out on the warm feeling of indignation enjoyed by their noisier, life-needing tribesmen, er, tribespeople. What’s most interesting is that today so-called enlightened liberals choose to ignore the Indian preference for “Indian” and still use the term “Native American.” Who’s the racist now?
For a long while ”black” was frowned upon in favor of the more divisive “African American,” which for a time became “Afro-American.” Personally, I found it all so confusing I decided to risk life and limb using the word “colored” in the hopes of a sort of reboot that might clear things up. Today “black” appears to be making a comeback.
You’re welcome.
Would I ever call a person suffering Down’s Syndrome a retard? Of course not. And below you’ll see that my use of the word isn’t used in a way to demean anyone. Just as Ben Stiller in Tropic Thunder uses the word to ridicule Hollywood, I use it to defend against censorship disguised as sensitivity.
Context not only matters, it’s everything.
Filed in General |
Mr24pon 13 Aug 2008 at 8:49 am 1Great piece!
Gina Dalfonzoon 13 Aug 2008 at 8:56 am 2I understand your point, but at the same time I find widespread use of the word worrisome. I think it’s because our national attitude toward Down syndrome people is so different from our national attitude toward minorities. If that weren’t the case, I don’t think 90 percent of Down syndrome pregnancies would be aborted, as they currently are. There’s a very real dehumanization and disrespect that’s troubling, especially when you’ve got “ethicists” out there trying to define personhood in terms of IQ and independence.
(I also notice that on the IMDb message boards of the only TV show currently featuring a recurring character with Down syndrome, a frequent theme is “Why is he even on this show? What’s the point of having a character with Down syndrome?” No one asks why there has to be a black or a Latina person. Now I realize it’s IMDb and signs of intelligent life are few and far between — that’s why I’m not going in-depth into the topic of the threads with titles like “Kill the retard” — but still, given the cultural background I mentioned, it’s hard not to find that sort of thing a little disturbing.)
I realize that “Tropic Thunder” was satirizing Hollywood’s take on the subject. But there’s a lot more to the subject than Hollywood’s take on it — as is, of course, the case with most subjects.
J Pon 13 Aug 2008 at 8:58 am 3I’m channeling a PC moron here…
“(heavy sigh) You insensitive neocon racists just don’t get…
I’M TRYING TO HELP SAVE THE WORLD HERE!!! WORDS HURT AS MUCH AS FISTS AND FOR THE BETTER OF HUMANS ALL OVER THE WORLD WE MUST CONTROL SPEECH!!! FREEDOM OF SPEECH IS SO OVER RATED AND AS A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD I CANNOT LET ALL YOU JEBUS WORSHIPING MORONS GET IN MY WAY!!! I’M BETTER THAN YOU WILL EVER BE BECAUSE I’M SHOWING THAT I CARE!”
All kidding aside, the PC movement is one of the greatest dangers to freedom around. I remember reading a couple of months back when some idiot on a Canadian Human Rights Court (aka kangaroo court) saying something that, “freedom of speech is an American concept that we don’t have to follow”. It seems that some people cannot grasp the fact that if you take away freedom of speech, you cannot have a free press or freedom of religion and forget about freedom from fear. You cannot have one without the others.
Yes we put restraints on our freedoms so we do not lose them all together (I’m talking about shouting “fire” in a theater and the like). Saying words that hurt and humiliate is wrong but banning words or trying to control freedom of speech is worse.
Great post Harry.
Tommy Von 13 Aug 2008 at 9:03 am 4“You don’t call retarded people retards. It’s bad taste. You call your friends retards when they’re acting retarded.”
- Michael Scott
Bubbaon 13 Aug 2008 at 9:09 am 5It it just me, or does Stalin look like Captain Kangaroo in that propaganda poster?
John Wrighton 13 Aug 2008 at 9:19 am 6What is funny, of course, is that the word ‘retarded’ is itself a euphemism, like ‘handicapped’. Instead of calling someone a moron or an idiot (terms which originally means someone with a brain defect, but which now mean someone with whom we have a sharp difference of opinion), he was called ‘retarded’ as if to indicate that he was developing albeit at a slower pace than his fellows. It is like calling someone ’slow’ rather than ’stupid.’
This is something like the polite euphemism of calling backward and uncivilized places in the world ‘developing nations’ even when they show signs of regression rather than development. ‘Retarded’ is actually something of a hopeful term.
(Handicapped, of course, is a term from racing, indicating that the horse must carry an extra burden so that he will not outstrip his slower competition. It is a flagrantly hopeful term, as if to imply that the cripples among us would be superior were it not for a handicap that draws them back down to mere equality with us.)
Since my son is severely autistic, and at age seven has not yet learned how to talk above the two-word level of a two-year-old, I alone have the right to say what words are rude and not rude to describe him. I hope that he is merely retarded, merely slower than a normal child, and that he will one day reach the place all other children rush to. I hope he will grow up to find honest labor and a loving wife, even if it takes him longer. He is the sweetest boy I know and I love him with all my heart. But he is retarded.
I hope by the time he is grown the vile dishonesty known as Political Correctness is as forgotten as the absurd circumlocutions of the fainting Victorians were forgotten by the Roaring 20’s. At least the Victorians were discrete on topics where a little discretion is called-for. The blaspheming potty-mouths of the Left, who wince to call someone ‘retarded’ no doubt flock to see ‘The Vagina Monologues’ or view the artistic wonders of ‘Piss Christ.’
When did we get into the position of having the most repulsive, smelly, vile and immoral generation of history, Castro-kissers and Coke-sniffers and Clinton-lovers, lecture us on moral probity?
Stephanieon 13 Aug 2008 at 9:22 am 7None of teh words listed as words that cannot be used should bother anyone. If your gonna censor those words why not censor retard? To me any censorship at all is fascist.
Striker Zon 13 Aug 2008 at 10:07 am 8There’s a difference between censorship and choosing not to use certain words.
Though, really, I’ve always thought the phrase ‘retarded’ was less insulting than ’special’. As if you’re relying on people not being bright enough to catch on to the sarcasm.
Full Metal Deer Platoonon 13 Aug 2008 at 10:19 am 9“So, what do you do?”
“I work with retards.”
“Thats, uh, not very politically correct.”
“F*ck that! No one’s going to tell me who I can spend my time with. Those goofy bastards are all I have in this world.”
/There’s Something About Mary.
Nick Nayloron 13 Aug 2008 at 10:33 am 10Freedom to do something doesn’t mean you have to do it, there is something called personal responsibility. I always thought it was one of those trademarks of conservatives. I am against censorship but I’m not about to hold a Klan meeting just because I can. It is called tact and it is something that the left has been missing for years, based on these posts it seems the right is joing the left, not holding themselves to a higher standard.
Jimboon 13 Aug 2008 at 10:36 am 11I will stop using the words “negro” and “colored” when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the United Negro College Fund change their names.
trzupron 13 Aug 2008 at 12:28 pm 12Very nice piece Harry.
Context is everything. One posts the word “retard” 125 times (I did count - how retarded is that?) on one’s home page to counterbalance PC idiocy. One doesn’t post it in response to an appeal for Down’s Syndrome research.
And I while agree with Nick Naylor that tact (and manners) are on the endangered species list, sometimes you can have fun in the gutter.
(You CAN’T, however, have fun in the front seat of a 1972 Datsun 1200 with a stick shift. Trust me. I still bear the scars…)
numbernexton 13 Aug 2008 at 12:31 pm 13Does this mean I cannot watch and enjoy the film “Charlie” anymore? I always laugh at the perpetually outraged. Remember all the brouhaha over nicknames for sports teams? Isn’t it quaint how that outrage goes away if they get paid a lot of money. Cleveland Indians and Washington Redskins come to mind.
I remember a few years ago white liberals were in an uproar over the cartoon Speedy Gonzalez - offensive to Mexicans don’t you know. Then it was found out that not only was the cartoon popular in Mexico but throughout much of South America as well. Of course that means nothing to the PC police and they had the cartoon banned I believe. The new Puritans are alive and well making sure that we live our lives properly.
Leo Grinon 13 Aug 2008 at 12:37 pm 14Gina Dalfonzo says:
My honest question is: what word should we use, and why? Words are given life by the people or things they describe, not the other way around, and they have a funny way of backfiring on the people who would use them to manipulate perceptions. Changing a word doesn’t escape negative connotations, the connotations simply roll over to the new word.
Liberals engage in this foolishness all the time. The very word liberal used to carry a largely positive meaning — until it was co-opted by the far left so that they could make their values sound timeless and beautiful. But that didn’t happen — instead, once it was associated with their anti-American, anti-religious, anti-military ideology, that previously noble word became poisoned into an epithet. The left assumed that conservatives had waged a successful smear campaign against the word, so they changed their name to progressive hoping to escape the stigma. But that changed nothing — it merely poisoned progressive in the same way.
Same with gay, previously one of the simplest, most beautiful words in the English language. Homosexuals thought that by co-opting the word in all it’s beauty and pageantry and joy they would be transformed in the eyes of others, swept up by the word’s longstanding and powerful positive connotations buttressed by a mountain of previous use in our greatest poetry and song and literature. Didn’t happen — the word quickly lost its original meaning and became synonymous with perversity. Words have no power on their own, they are just a passel of grunts and pops and hisses until applied to something. Change what they are applied to, and you instantly alter their meaning.
If you change the words to describe kids with Down Syndrome to anything else, soon that word will acquire all of the same connotations as the one being railed against here. Retarded used to be a fairly soulless, innocuous word. Back in the day, chemicals were designed as retardant, to retard flame or rust, et cetera. The word was thus quite logically used to describe development in humans that was judged slow or delayed. It only attained its current pariah status in the schoolyard, and any new word you care to invent or apply can and will quickly be picked dry of respect in the same way. The word hasn’t dehumanized the condition and the people who suffer from it, its the condition itself that is dehumanizing, whatever you choose to call it.
The only way to escape this is to use wordage that is so broad and euphemistic as to mean nothing. Phrasings like mental impairment, learning disability, and developmental disorder all share a complete failure to accurately describe the conditions they are allegedly designed to delineate. They can in practice mean any number of things that have nothing to do with true retardation. In fact, I would argue that such evasions have allowed lots of fakers and opportunists to hop onto the money train and get government handouts for a slew of ad-hoc “disabilities,” money that otherwise would have went to the truly retarded who need it.
Trying to take the tragedy and pain — the life and soul — out of life by manipulating the language is a giant shell game that never works. Truth always finds a way.
Audietooon 13 Aug 2008 at 12:44 pm 15Retarded was outlawed in the sixties when the mentally retarded converted to developmentally disabled. Imbecile, idiot, moron, were technical scientific terms to describe the level of retardation. Those were dropped post haste when the “smartest, most idealistic” generation in the history of the world (I am paraphrasing “The Greening of America” if there is anyone else who remembers that book) first began to infiltrate the institutions of a free nation.
Freedom requires the structure built by agreed upon social norms and social “punishment” for those who break those norms. We are all familiar with the Amish and how they “banish” (that isn’t the right word) those who break the social norms. The smartest generation also destroyed the capacity of Americans to inflict similiar social costs. If you are getting the impression I don’t care for boomers you are wrong I have two children in that group.
Lurking Veton 13 Aug 2008 at 12:51 pm 16I think the developmentally disabled - and maybe moreso, the people who claim to advocate on their behalf - should do to “retarded” what gays did with “queer” - take it back, own it, throw it back in the faces of those who used it as an insult. So much more effective than squelching free speech.
Kiton 13 Aug 2008 at 2:15 pm 17From the Online Etymology Dictionary:
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=retardation
retardation
1426, “fact or action of making slower in movement or time,” from L. retardationem, from retardare “to make slow, delay, keep back, hinder,” from re-, intensive prefix, + tardare “to slow” (see tardy). Retarded “mentally slow” first recorded 1895. Retard (v.) first recorded 1489, from O.Fr. retarder (13c.); offensive noun meaning “stupid person” (with accent on first syllable) is from 1960s slang.
Kiton 13 Aug 2008 at 2:18 pm 18Leo Grin,
As to your no. 14:
GREAT POST!
tranquilitason 13 Aug 2008 at 2:31 pm 19I don’t generally find the need for labels. However, if for some reason it’s necessary to explain someone’s situation I avoid generic adjectives and use the more descriptive term such as “She has Down’s Syndrome”.
Tact is a hard to find commodity in today’s culture.
Matt Helmon 13 Aug 2008 at 2:40 pm 20A friend of mine taught in a Massachusetts school for mentally handicapped kids. His paycheck from the state was from The Office of Retardation, or something like that, but a variation of “retard” was in its title. Point is, even when it became un-PC to use the term, the state was still using it to describe these kids (may still be) on their letterheads, paychecks, envelopes, etc. But you couldn’t refer to the kids as being retarded, in the school. Maybe they don’t want the word used by others because the hypocrisy of liberal states is, well, retarded.
The Ugly Americanon 13 Aug 2008 at 2:56 pm 21I can honestly say that I’ve never used “African-American”, nor any other hyphenated term for an American.
“Black” has always been the norm for me and I’ve never heard any complaints.
The Ugly Americanon 13 Aug 2008 at 3:09 pm 22When I was a youngster, “mentally retarded” was the descriptive norm used by the staff at our local psychiatric hospital.
Of course now, it’s considered a hate crime to utter that term.
Gideon7on 13 Aug 2008 at 3:18 pm 23The PC term eventually gets overused and becomes un-PC. So another term is invented, which gets worn out, and so the cycle continues. Retarded becomes developmentally challenged becomes developmentally different becomes special. Each being less descriptive than the last.
WHAT WOULD TOTO WATCH? » ‘Tropic Thunder’ - ‘Full Metal’ hilarity ‘Tropic Thunder’ - ‘Full Metal’ hilarity — WHAT WOULD TOTO WATCH?on 13 Aug 2008 at 3:28 pm 24[…] is drawing fire from special interest groups for the latter and its frequent use of the word “retard,” but discerning audiences will know where the humor is targeted. And they’ll be […]
Nick Nayloron 13 Aug 2008 at 5:34 pm 25The problem I see is using retard as a derogatory term for someone who is not mentally retarded, not the fact that retardation is a useful word in the English language. I don’t really care if you use retarded, special, mentally challanged, or any other of the plethora of terms that can be used. But like calling someone a fag or homo who is not gay, it is not really that demeaning to the peson who receives the insult, but to the people who are actually gay, etc.
Mike Kriskeyon 13 Aug 2008 at 7:06 pm 26Why is everyone pretending that there is no difference between the word “retarded” and the word “retard?” One is a descriptive term, and the other is an insult.
It’s like saying it’s okay to call a black person “blackie.” Or a Japanese person a “Jap.” “Nigger” was once just a variant of “Negro.” The fact that words look similar doesn’t mean there isn’t a distinction.
Buck Turgidsonon 13 Aug 2008 at 7:48 pm 27“Handicapped, of course, is a term from racing . . . ”
Actually it comes from the words it looks like, “cap” and “hand.” In the old days it was common for handicapped people who couldn’t work by virtue of their condition to beg for a living, cap in hand, asking for money from passers by. Hence the word handicapped.
Phoenixon 13 Aug 2008 at 8:24 pm 28There’s the rub. The term was made for accurate and literal, clinical designation of actually retarded people so as to not be mocking, rather than for slinging as a maligning.
Directing it at them in a denigrating tone is bad, but when used that way as a general term, it encompasses them all.
Also, the phrases mentally retarded and retarded are descriptions of aptitude, while “a retard” is a personal designation slang. There is no “He’s a Handicap”; this usage is like “He’s handicapped” vs. “he’s a Gimp”.
Thus you could say with tact “the director’s attempt to keep up with the times is retarded and needs work”, but not “he’s Retarded” or “he’s a Retard”.
Likewise Negro was revived to supplant Nigger with a respectably neutral term, so would you say “That screw-up was so Negro. I’m not calling all Negros Negro, I’m just sayin this other guy sucks like a Negro”? Klonk.
It is clearly used to demean “Retarded” itself, which unavoidably encompasses ALL retarded people (of all ages) also. “I am the definition of retarded”.
This parsed usage is equivalent to Chris Rock saying “I don’t aim “nigger” at all black people, but that don’t mean some ain’t niggers”.
Yes, terms evolve awkwardly over time. Idiot meant retarded, and then sprawled to general application. Court jesters were Fools and everyday people could act foolish, I’m not sure which direction that sprawled. Other words to use? In today’s vernacular:
A character fault of willful lazy thinking = foolish, idiotic, or stupid
Stupid not = retarded
Retarded = brain damage handicap, retarding a person’s self and life
Retard = “Gimp jokes”
I had one retarded kid on my block, and another that was permanently institutionalized, and our parents made clear that those parents didn’t want to spend the summer hearing us healthy kids running around having fun slinging “retard” (even if aimed at each other rather than them).
It can’t cut deeper than seeing your child openly and routinely kicked in the heart while their whole person is “down” crippled and struggling for mere normalcy for their entire lifetime.
These examples are apple and oranges.
Forget playing on the liberal game board, use your normal judgment.
Gasp.
Some other posters; please, more dedication? You’re mixing up subjects: contesting with what liberals demand rather than determining truth; normal use of the word as in “our progress was retarded by rain”; using “mentally retarded” for people who are, vs. use as a pejorative; Cindy Sheehan’s “absolute moral authority”, etc.
This is so stupid
Zundfolgeon 13 Aug 2008 at 9:05 pm 29The only way to truly successfully destroy freedom of speech and thought (especially when you live under a constitution that expressly reinforces it) is to equate simple words with real physical violence.
Blur that line and “hate speech” can be banned as easily as “assault with a deadly weapon” and the proles will cheer as their liberty is further eroded.
On a side note, I never understood why “colored” was considered bad … I always thought it had a genteel and polite sound to it, much more so than “black” even. Oh well, “black” it is.
Flexoon 13 Aug 2008 at 11:57 pm 30I’ll wade in here and say that I’ve always hated the term ‘Native American’. Human life is not indigenous to the western hemisphere. The original North Americans came across the land bridge from Siberia. My heritage is German and English but I am literally a native American. I was born here. My parents were born here. My parents’ parents were born here.
T.S.Benchon 14 Aug 2008 at 7:47 am 31A couple of my favorite true PC stories….
Back in the 80’s, while commuting to my job in Boston, a radio station had on an ‘expert’ on “Native American” culture, (a local academic) who was commenting that Native Americans find the terms “Indian” and “Tribe” to be “insultingly derogatory.” At that moment, a shiny new van pulled up beside me on the Expressway. On the driver’s side door, under a logo, were the words “Wampanoag Indian Tribal Council.”
A number of high school athletic teams around here use Indian mascots and names, since they figure prominently in local history. I could never quite figure out why some Indians and many local do-gooders, who have turned umbrage-taking into a art form, find this insulting, since giving teams names which confer virtues deemed worthy of emulating and/or reference historical fact, would seem to me an honor, not a slam (the army doesn’t name all their helicopters after Indian tribes to ridicule them.) Our local high school teams are named after a tribe which inhabited the area going back for probably a thousand years. During a school committee meeting, the topic of changing the name to something less ‘demeaning’ was mentioned. After much forelock tugging and bemoaning the mean-spiritedness of this ‘demeaning’ practice, and member of the audience rose, introduced himself as a member of the tribe in question, and quipped that if the football team carrying his tribe’s name (which had gone 0-18 over the last two years) “didn’t get goddam better in a goddam hurry the tribe may take them to court for slander.”
It defused the situation, and the team’s name has never changed, although it has gotten better.
Lastly, during a panel discussion amongst more local ‘experts’ on a sport radio station concerning the changing of the name of the Washington Redskins football team, a recurring theme, the racially demeaning derivation of the name was being discussed. I called in, and mentioned that the term ‘redskins’ actually came from the Jesuit Chronicles. It appears that a missionary was living with a group of Indians around the Great Lakes who used the local red clay to dye everything red, including their own bodies and even those of their horses and livestock. The missionary quite reasonably referred to them as ‘redskins’, which makes sense especially when you consider that American Indians aren’t particularly naturally red. The term caught on in Europe, where the reports of the North American missionaries were widely read as the true adventure stories of the day, and gradually ended up being applied to all NA Indians (today, in Europe, “Red Indian” is used in conversation and writing to differentiate North American indians from South American and Asians Indians.) It obviously wasn’t a slam, since no group was more friendly or devoted to the local tribes than the Jesuits (who actually travelled as ‘chaplains’ with war parties on raids during the French and Indian War.)
The response from the leader of the ‘expert’ group…”What was the Jesuit Chronicles”?
They don’t make experts like they used to.
Regards,
TSB
StringerBon 14 Aug 2008 at 9:07 am 32“These poor people have been bullshitted by the system into believing that if you change the name of the condition, somehow you’ll change the condition!” -George Carlin in 1990’s “Doin’ it Again” HBO special, re. the use of the term “differently abled”
GMKon 14 Aug 2008 at 4:47 pm 33I’m going to call black people black because I’m not trading seven syllables for a single one that was good enough before. Black people picked it. I don’t hate anybody either but I am not going to empower the PC police and the self-appointed guardians of decency by jumping through any arbitrary hoops.
The word nigger offended me ten years ago. I remember, I was on a plane to Milwaukee and this old woman next to me, very proper old lady, I was telling her about an area of Detroit that went completely to hell since she’d seen it… she looked at me sympathetically, kind of sad, and said “Niggers?”
I was offended. I used to at least provisionally invest in that whole thing. Now, frankly, get the fuck over it. If someone calls me a cracker I’m not going to suddenly reverse the crime statistics. I don’t even care. Blacks commit 43 times as much violent crime on whites as the reverse on a per capita basis. The rape ratio essentially gives you a divide by zero error it’s so one-sided. I completely and categorically reject the idea that I’m victimizing blacks in the slightest by anything I do. I was born into a world where the laws were stacked against me to benefit other people, like me, that were born into a system they didn’t negotiate. I don’t owe blacks an apology, I don’t owe them anything and I’m not going to flinch and cower because some moronic fucking liberal nazi tries to tell me I should. I have been known to occasionally use the word nigger, but only to drive liberal fascists in earshot to complete insanity… so I can take a rhetorical lead pipe to them in front of their friends. That’s a long road from when I was one of the proper white people who got offended just because some old lady made a completely accurate guess that black people destroyed part of a city, and used a disparaging word.
Frankly, I live in a culture that has made me the nigger. And I refuse to cooperate or be complicit in it. If people want to genuflect in front of rules set up to unfairly contain and disparage them, that’s up to them, but I’m one nigger that fights back.
ceann ruaon 14 Aug 2008 at 7:44 pm 34Lurking Vet, you said ‘..developmentally disabled…should do to “retarded” what gays did with “queer” - take it back, own it, throw it back in the faces of those who used it as an insult. So much more effective than squelching free speech.’
Good point. I do the same with cripple. when my Hero brother and I hear differently abled, my brother who is an Iraq war vet says ‘ I can juggle knives, now THAT is differently abled. My brother’s a cripple.’
Oh, Lurking Vet thank you for your service.