I don’t know about that. What I do is try to listen to why a group thinks a word is offensive.
The thing with “retard” is that it has been used to refer to people with mental disabilities for a very long time. By saying “republicans are retards” you say “rebilocsns are as stupid as people that were born with a mental disability”.
Thing is, people with mental disabilities are still people. There are goofy, snarky, nice, some are even quite big assholes. Many can be a lot of fun to interact with. They are just people, even if they are not as intelligent as you or me.
Referring to people as retarded, to me, means setting mentaly disabled people as the baseline for beeing idiots. And I just don’t think it’s fair to reduce them to something, they had no saying in what so ever. They didn’t choose to be born that way and they shouldn’t be reduced to just that.
I completely understand. In ITIL terms they’re addressing the incident - the thing that is causing someone immediate harm. To continue the ITIL analogy, the problem is not being addressed and will never be addressed. I am confident humanity will never stop using the concept of mental disabilities as a slur regardless of the verbiage used.
Any ‘nice’ term you can think up is immediately ammo for someone to use once it starts getting traction as the new way to talk about it. “Trump has a mental disability”, “republicans are mentally disabled” are two examples of what people could say until that term is no longer acceptable, and the cycle repeats.
Really what should change is that mental disabilities should be normalized so that descriptors cannot be used to degrade people based on a reality that cannot be changed.
Anyway, regardless of our best intentions, empathy, patience and understanding for others, the cycle will just keep continuing. Idiot is a great example of a word for the same thing and is used frequently and often because people simply have forgotten over the generations how it was once used. It’s original term was innocuous, simply describing common individuals, not necessarily implying any truly negative thing. Eventually it was used to describe the mentally disabled, and then used as a slur, and then it fell out of favor for a long, long time. Ultimately the meaning and the application is the same. The problem remains.
I don’t know about that. What I do is try to listen to why a group thinks a word is offensive.
The thing with “retard” is that it has been used to refer to people with mental disabilities for a very long time. By saying “republicans are retards” you say “rebilocsns are as stupid as people that were born with a mental disability”.
Thing is, people with mental disabilities are still people. There are goofy, snarky, nice, some are even quite big assholes. Many can be a lot of fun to interact with. They are just people, even if they are not as intelligent as you or me.
Referring to people as retarded, to me, means setting mentaly disabled people as the baseline for beeing idiots. And I just don’t think it’s fair to reduce them to something, they had no saying in what so ever. They didn’t choose to be born that way and they shouldn’t be reduced to just that.
/rant I guess
I completely understand. In ITIL terms they’re addressing the incident - the thing that is causing someone immediate harm. To continue the ITIL analogy, the problem is not being addressed and will never be addressed. I am confident humanity will never stop using the concept of mental disabilities as a slur regardless of the verbiage used.
Any ‘nice’ term you can think up is immediately ammo for someone to use once it starts getting traction as the new way to talk about it. “Trump has a mental disability”, “republicans are mentally disabled” are two examples of what people could say until that term is no longer acceptable, and the cycle repeats.
Really what should change is that mental disabilities should be normalized so that descriptors cannot be used to degrade people based on a reality that cannot be changed.
Anyway, regardless of our best intentions, empathy, patience and understanding for others, the cycle will just keep continuing. Idiot is a great example of a word for the same thing and is used frequently and often because people simply have forgotten over the generations how it was once used. It’s original term was innocuous, simply describing common individuals, not necessarily implying any truly negative thing. Eventually it was used to describe the mentally disabled, and then used as a slur, and then it fell out of favor for a long, long time. Ultimately the meaning and the application is the same. The problem remains.