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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
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politics
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I know a lot of wonderful individuals who deserve the dignity of not having that slur used in common parlance and also not having their disabilities being compared to .ml users. The .ml guys are almost universally bad people and they are not.
Well we're probably thinking of different words then.
Having disabilities, disease, cognitive challenges or neurological differences, has nothing to do with being retarded. That's reserved for the willful stupidity, authoritarians, and otherwise those politically active while being divorced from reality.
It was the official designation for intellectual disability in the icd 9. While the icd 10 was released in 1993 America didn’t fully transition to icd 10 until like 2014-2015. Aside from the clinical aspect anyone whos older than like 11 years old and speaks English is very aware that word is used to disparage someone’s opinion by comparing them to the intellectually disabled.
You can decide to ignore that very real and very recent history to assuage your guilt for saying slurs but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re saying slurs and doubling down because you can’t stand being called out for talking like a 13 year old call of duty player
Yes, I will happily continue to misuse slurs. But thanks for the history lesson. I also call myself an "idiot" and "moron" with some frequency, so if that's indeed how language works then I suppose I may have some claim to the slur...
However, I don't think linguistics works like that. Perhaps you learned nothing from the endless cycle of prescriptive rebranding, but many others have. I find much personal utility in these sorts of words, with very directed usage and now even my explicitly declared intent.
If you or anyone else was offended or personally hurt by an (obviously understandable) misunderstanding, then I wish to make it very clear that I sincerely apologize for any undue harm, as my intended target was not you and I wasn't using the same word you're thinking of. But if you wish to stubbornly continue to take something else from them other than what I mean, and after I've elaborated on what I meant,... then that's not really my problem anymore. After that, you're not really "calling me out" so much as just being wrong
Okay then say the n word. By your rationale if your intent is not to disparage a racial minority and instead to utilize a personal utility that continues to define it as a disparagement but wink wink doesn’t count as a slur then it’s fine, right?
The point is you can describe your “intent” all you want but that doesn’t change the fact that these words are regularly used as pejorative slurs to disparage an entire class. Prescriptive rebranding takes generations to shift and doesn’t even work all the time (eg mongoloid) unless you do mental gymnastics to ignore the harm you’re doing, like you are
Well you're right that my line of reasoning certainly works better for some words than others; ones where there's more room for ambiguity or flexible usage. Nigger in particular is strong to your point; very heavily weighted in American English with active reclamation efforts under the 'soft R' nigga. There's a definate "in-group" ruleset for their common usage with a lot less wiggleroom. But a counterpoint would be trap: the maybe-slur for transgender to some, while being a self-descriptor for others or a completely distinct term to even more (referring to the dimensions of gender expression rather than gender identity). More commonly used with strong positive connotations in the anime-adjacent communities while simultaneously it has been deployed as verbiage in Latin America and south Asia as part of legal defenses for the literal murder of trans and nonbinary-expressing people.
I completely understand how someone who's familiar with the word trap in one setting would be absolutely put off by seeing it so casually used in another, especially if that person was effected by it elsewhere in their life to some capacity. But that doesn't mean all other uses are invalid or need to be censored; we can acknowledge how that's terrible and denounce it without also having to tell every anime-coded trap femboy on tumblr that they need to change their bio or else they're implicitly supporting trans genocide...
The word retard has a troubled past (almost everything to do with the history of IQ does; like imbecile, idiot, and moron, which were common descriptors even before they became clinical signifers, and they've returned to their colloquial usage in modern-day).
But I'd really like to see a world in which the treadmill stops, even if temporarily; what if retard was adopted as a non-slur perjorative, despite the clinical definitions changing to destigmatize? The word is currently seeing a resurgence for various reasons and on both sides of the American political spectrum; woke 2 shedding the hollow liberal virtuesignalling in favor of direct action, and the right acting like it's a cultural victory (which it isn't); somehow there's a perfect storm which may allow the colloquial focus to be held bad despite the clinical terms moving forward. It's almost like a firebreak that's pulling oxygen from "special" or "challenged" or "deficient" growing in popularity as schoolyard-grade insults (or whatever the latest generation is; I haven't kept track)
For the first time (I can think of, at least) there's actually hope for a destigmatizing effort to last longer than a decade! And part of that is the aire of taboo which can be pushed back at. So for that, I thank you for your contribution, ironically.
But we can agree to disagree.
I just call them low IQ individuals instead because I bet most of them like to brag about having a high one.