There’s a clear campaign against the mentally ill with the global rise of fascism. Lots of it shows up in anti homeless rhetoric, but you can see it in the MAHA and anti vaccination movements.
There’s no reason to use the word “r-tarded” to describe someone. As someone who’s worked with the intellectually challenged, it’s an insult to them to compare them with people who are willfully ignorant.
There’s a historical cycle where the helping professions rotate the terminology out, as the wider culture overloads the old terms with insulting usage. Eventually the new vernacular leaks out into general parlance and the cycle cycles. “Retarded” was once acceptable clinical terminology because "idiot, “moron”, and “imbecile” had accumulated cultural baggage. The latter terms were, themselves, once politically correct alternatives to even older terms.
I think it’s naive to think that THIS time is special, and today’s politically correct terminology won’t ever leak out into common usage as a slur too.
Right, so then we rotate words again. This isn’t hard. We’re not trying to find the One True Politically Correct Term; we’re arguing that one (1) specific word has a negative bias and we need to stop using it.
If a group of people are telling me this word was and continues to be used as a dehumanizing slur, that’s enough for me to look into a vocabulary change. More importantly, the very existence of a euphemism treadmill shows that you can’t stop at language change, and that disabled people need to be much more fully accepted in society.
I got a lot of hate in this thread but I agree with you. We need to much more accepting of people in society disabled or just different. A word change makes you feel good but doesn’t actually do anything. A business with a curb should be required to have a ramp also, for wheelchairs. I wish there was a some sort of option for drive-thru for deaf people. A person with autism who gets overly stimulated by people close should be allowed to ask for personal distance.
Which gets to the larger problem - the dehumanization of people with intellectual and cognitive disabilities. Being such a person is considered such a bad thing that it can be used as an insult. Whatever terminology we use, people with cognitive delays are just as human, just as valuable as anyone else.
Precisely! 100% agree.
I also want to add that I don’t disagree with people who say that there’s a cyclical pattern with words becoming taboo and being replaced. That’s obviously a fact. But the fact that language evolves doesn’t give us license to be assholes.
Ultimately, the only thing that will improve things is educating the average person about the topic. But calling out ableist language - whether the person using such language intends that meaning or not - is often a good starting point for education (for those willing to learn.)
Also, what most people don’t understand is that developmental delays and cognitive deficiencies are a spectrum and can occur across different types of cognition. For example, I’m what today you might call “doubly special” - I was far ahead in some areas but far behind in others. I still am, to a degree.
So should people use the names for people like me to refer to assholes who intentionally hurt other people’s feelings? I certainly wouldn’t like it if they did. Regardless of how much I might accidentally piss people off or hurt their feelings, it’s rarely my intention to make people feel that way and and I’d rather not have someone else’s moral failing conflated with my struggle to communicate in ways most people understand.
Neurospicy