Are the corporations in the room with us now?

It was used and is used to cause harm to vulnerable people. It is the last and likely immortalized step of this particular euphemism treadmill.

The treadmill stopped here. There is no one-size-fits-all diagnosis to replace “mental retardation” because that was a terrible disgnosis to begin with. That’s why something is wrong with the word. The people whose lives were ground up beneath the turning of the wheels that powered that euphemism treadmill are still alive today.

Yes, if the treadmill had continued for one more step before we stopped using such horribly broad diagnosis criteria to lump together vulnerable people with wildly different needs, the word would lose its weight and implications.

Whatever diagnosis that might have replaced it would be regarded with the same moral repugnance as this word is today, and this word would be used as casually and apathetically as we use the word “idiot” - because we can be reasonably certain that nobody in the room has any memories of themselves or someone they love being excluded, humiliated, and diagnosed by this word.

The treadmill stopped. It’s okay. You can join the rest of the world and step off of it now, knowing that we are better equipped to understand and protect our most vulnerable.