Comment on Well would you look at that...
ViceroTempus@lemmy.world 23 hours agoMoron and Idiot were the original correlations. People adopted those words as insults and the medical community adopted new words, and then those words got used as insults, and then the medical community adopted new words…
And on and on and on. Moron equates you to someone with diminished capacity like someone with down syndrome, to use your example. So does Idiot, and Imbecile. As again they were medical terms turned into insults lol.
So like by all means hate Retarded as word, but have some consistency.
BCsven@lemmy.ca 23 hours ago
The terms moron and idiot are still used on the test reports, but nobody nowawdays associates calling somebody an idiot/moron with a slur against the mentally challenged, but the R word is.
Like under your argument we can still call people gay as a slur because it used to mean happy.
We stopped calling people gay or R word in the early 90s dude.
NonconfrontationaI@lemmy.ml 13 hours ago
Wtf? Were you not around then? No we absolutely didn’t.
It wasn’t until the early oughts that it started to fall out of fashion and it wasn’t until the teens that it was considered slur territory.
BCsven@lemmy.ca 11 hours ago
We did where I lived. Was around the George Michael and other stars coming out, and people waking up about slurs, N word also was dropping out.
ViceroTempus@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Lmao, sorry, sorry. I just wasn’t expecting to get told, wrongly, about history I lived through. Retard didn’t fall out of favor until the 2010’s, and gay as an insult only started wearing off towards the late 00’s early 10’s which is why you can still see it in media from the time.
Not sure how old you are, but I found it very funny.
NonconfrontationaI@lemmy.ml 13 hours ago
Wow I didn’t see that you wrote an almost identical comment first, lol.
ViceroTempus@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I do that all the time lol. Sometimes you just stop at a comment, do your reply, only to find out someone else beat you to it lol.
BCsven@lemmy.ca 17 hours ago
Highschool mid 80s. Maybe I just lived in a more progressive zone, where language changed faster, or people realised it was not couth
ViceroTempus@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
So two things that makes this believable for me. One you grew into an adult so you weren’t as naturally aware of the younger generation’s lexicon.
And also you lived closer to the inception of the word. Its very possible that “Retard” met the specificity requirement in your time for a slur, and meant a very particular caricature in that time. Which, is what I think is need for a word to be slur. It needs two things Hate, and specificity towards a particular subset of humans. Think about all the other slurs, they very specific aspect to them when you think of the word, to the point you can’t mistake it for another subset of humans. Which is my problem with Retard being a slur, even in the medical diagnoses it was an umbrella term. It wasn’t like “Downs” that was bandied about in my childhood, and IMO is the real slur of my time for this subject.
So I think “Retard” may have just became generalized by the time it my generations lexicon, because I knew the definition as “Incredibly Stupid” before I had ever met a mentally disabled person. And when I had, trust me, I would have gotten my ass beat by my peers if I had even uttered “stupid” in there direction. Which, IMO, would have been the right call. Besides I would never have insulted Ronnie like that, kid was decent and kind.
Btw, this has been interesting to me, and I appreciate this discussion even though there are those that disagree. I hope you know I don’t have any ill-will towards you, and very much enjoyed this.