Wow the 80s were real different. You could advertise as a swinger and it’s just chill.
The secret ninth rule of fight club
there’s something hauntingly poetic about the ebb and flows of human compassion coming together to form language that allows the marginalized to express their need for emancipation, only for the inevitable surge of encultured ableism to quell that spark and steal that language for its own purpose. over and over and over. what will break the cycle? will people with disabilities ever get to have a concrete hold on the words they use to describe themselves, or is this a permanent fixture in the world we are forcing onto the disabled?
In the latest Diagnostic and Statistics Manual (DSM-5-TR), intellectual disability is the term that replaces mental retardation meaning mentally slow or delayed. Before mental retardation, it was mental deficiency implying there was something inferior. To me, there’s no real difference between mental deficiency and intellectual disability. They are synonymous. Before the first DSM, a prominent doctor in the field of intelligence created a tiered system of intelligence that applied the labels moron, imbecile, and idiot (ordered higher to lower intelligence). Those words became derogatory too. The issue is not that scientists can’t guess the correct term that wont become an insult.
The issue is that society defines values for people which allows terms to be insults. As long as oppression exists, the vulnerable will fall victim to it. The disabled, by definition, will always be part of the vulnerable group. Additionally, oppression is always justified by arguments on who deserves what, whether it be religion, race, sex, social class, work ethic, or intelligence. As long as we hold the value that inequitable distribution is not only acceptable but the ultimate goal of a just society, then regardless of the rules we establish, however noble or virtuous, the disabled will always be part of the oppressed, and thus, the terms for lower intelligence will continually evolve from neutral to derogatory.
As long as we hold the value that inequitable distribution is not only acceptable but the ultimate goal of a just society, then regardless of the rules we establish, however noble or virtuous, the disabled will always be part of the oppressed, and thus, the terms for lower intelligence will continually evolve from neutral to derogatory.
Preach! 🗣️🗣️🔥
The deaf seem to own it. They made up their own language and ableism can’t do shit.
But that is the only exception I can think of. (And they are really independent).
Mostly because we don’t give a shit what the hearing say about us
We were commenting on your nice shoulders but that’s fine 😭
excellent point! i hope for a future where the same patterns can work for the good of all disabled identities
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Yes, different subsets of the disabled community have emancipated their language to different degrees.
Have you ever heard “special olympics” being used as an insult? What about “acoustic” or “neurodivergent”? “Special needs” or “the ‘tism”? Sadly, I have. That’s why, when I see these terms being abused in day to day life, I tend to call it out. I want those words to belong to the people they represent, not people who just want to verbally abuse.
But yeah, asking “what’s special” is sort of the wrong way to think about it. The fight for disability rights has barely started in the grand scheme of things, and it’s only natural that some disabled identities have obtained more broad acceptance than others. Good question though.
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As I get older, I have more and more sympathy for people who can’t keep up with socially acceptable terminology. At the same time, I have less and less tolerance for people who deliberately use outdated, insulting language.
I have zero tolerance for people who think that their variety of a language is superior to all others, and that they get to impose it on others.
Spoken like a true neurodivergent.
Give it a few more years and then “mentally disabled” will be the new retarded. We’ll cringe at how people would say they’re “disabled”.
I work with the mentally disabled and have for a while now. I love my guys but it’s so annoying seeing how new terms will come and go throughout the years constantly.
The Euphemism Treadmill might stop when the term is so clinically dry as “mentally disabled”. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue of a schoolyard bully the way “retarded” does. I dunno, we’ll see.
I thought they already changed it to differently abled. As dis-abled implies they can’t do something, when differently implies they can do things, yet they may just do it in another manner.
retarded doesn’t have any more negative meaning than disabled. it’s just about how we use it.
Ha. That’s retarded.
It just gets shortened to disabled. I’ve seen it used countless times as an insult.
I’m pretty sure that “mentally retarded” was the medical term for many decades, before it became cultural lingo. There was something similar for erectile dysfunction too, they used to call you impotent, not exactly a great thing to hear at the doctor’s office.
i wish you were right :( citing experience haha
Culture evolves. I will say, some of the new terms drive me nuts because they technically mean the same thing, but are grammatically awkward or are otherwise clunky when conveying the same message.
Like sure, I technically have a disability, please don’t try to frame it as a good thing or something to make it sound better. It just sounds condescending. I don’t need pity, I’m living my life to the fullest now :P
Doug Stanhope has a bit about that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dqsgxLyl5ESo accurate hahaha
would say they’re “handi-capable”.
FTFY
Saw this at a consignment shop a couple months ago, from about that same time period.Reminds me of the slow children signs around neighborhoods. Every time my brain thinks… Are the kids to slow to get out of the way, or are they to mentally slow to know to not play in traffic. Then I remember I’m to mentally slow to realize it’s me who is supposed to slow for the children but there is no punctuation so I just chuckle.
Actually I wonder if my neighbors would like it if I put this sign out front
That was simply the euphemism du jour, on the eternal euphemism treadmill.
Here’s my random two cents about disability euphemisms.
I personally think “special”, which was pretty popular like 10 years ago, was/is pretty demeaning. Even the more recent “differently-abled” feels weird.
I think the plain language of “disability”, which seems to have been around quite a while now, is fine. It’s what is says on the tin, without judgement.
Why does everyone assume it’s “eternal” or “never ending”? Each time the euphemisms change, it’s due to more inclusivity, more empathy, and more attempts to understand the plight of others. It’s reasonable to assume that it’ll stop at a point when we reach the right terms. It probably has already, and I just can’t think of any examples off the top of my head…
Each time the euphemisms change, it’s due to more inclusivity, more empathy, and more attempts to understand the plight of others.
True if the terminology becomes more accurate, but a euphemism for euphemism’s sake is the equivalent of sweeping dirt under a rug.
The euphemism treadmill sure is differently abled
can you really call it a euphemism when it just used to be a medical term back then?
Where can I get one of these shirts…I love it…anyone own a printing press?
All things are possible with the help of a local maker space
I am so glad you posted this. Sometimes I get into little arguments about word usage and younger folk truly don’t understand how not only commonplace word usage that is considered some sort of insult now but how officially they were used. Near me was a place that helped folks with all sorts of independent living including housing and job training and just counseling and it was called the NSAR and Im almost sure the R was retardation. Think it changed its name and I can’t find anything on it now but I did find like this https://mn.gov/mnddc/parallels2/pdf/70s/70/70s-WWH-NARC.pdf
It’s hard to fully explain how the reception of words change to people who haven’t seen it first-hand.
Even some bad words, which might be incredibly rude to say today, didn’t have the same oomph in the past, so while the definition technically might not have changed, the intended severity of it has.
yeah and part of it is they were used as insults but it was more co-opting than anything else. retarded is pretty legit as saying someone is retarded can be proper, but someone will call someone retarded who is not as an insult. then shortening is almost never correct. You might say someone is retarded and that is a correct thing about their condition but saying their a retard is not as its sorta a made up word based on the condition and further tard or tarded is a way to make it more derogatory. Its like homosexual. its a word that means something without being derogatory but to someone who thinks being a homosexual is bad will use it as an insult and using the word homo is almost always an insult (the rare exception is usage among friends to sorta deflate its meaning). When it comes down to it is that folks who spent decades with a word being legitamate will have trouble when it becomes a taboo thing for a decade or so.
I have a special needs uncle and my whole life I grew up with him being called “retarded” and it not being a slur.
It was just a way to describe his mental functioning.
To me it doesn’t have the same impact because I had never heard it used pejoratively until after it was a no-no word.
Disney’s Recess was censored to remove the term midget
Apparently now little person/lesser human is the preferred term
I find it hard to believe lesser human would be used as a term. Its a bit funny because again midget was also used as opposed to dwarf by the relative proportionality even though dwarfism was appropriate for both types. Was it being used to describe someone in the show with dwarfism though because if not then it was sorta being used derogatorily.
In the first episode the line
the midget girl is right
Was use towards the short girl of the main cast when she stood up to authority
Ah the Euphemism Treadmill. Live long enough and words we use today for intellectual disability will become inappropriate too.
I only really mind when it’s done by normies like myself about a minority group that we aren’t a part of. Like taking offense on behalf of someone else.
If a group wants to mix up their own terms just because, I’m 100 percent behind them.
Whenever medical science came up with a term to describe people with cognitive or intellectual impairments, it eventually became used as a derogatory insult. The R word was going out for a long time before Rosa’s Law put the mail in the coffin.
Why is retarded considered so offensive that people self censor but idiot isn’t? Is it just that retarded reached its peak in the internet era of policing speech or is there something special about the word that makes it much more offensive than idiot or imbecile?
They both have the same meanings, intentions, and ability to be used as an insult.
A) Time changes culture and language. I have no way to measure, but “idiot” could certainly have been on par with “retard” in its time.
B) The coopting of “retard” came at a time with a more mature disability rights movement. With the ADA passed in 1990, disabled individuals had a much greater capacity to speak out against the theft of their language than was possible in previous iterations of this pattern. You mention this a bit with your “peak internet era” comment, though a more charitable reading of that sentence might be that internet is allowing disabled people to get together and voice their experiences of being harrassed and abused in conjunction with the word, really speaking out for themselves rather than taking it lying down.
Under Rosa’s law, these would be described respectively as profound, severe, and moderate levels of intellectual disability.
Unfortunately, I don’t see the cycle breaking anytime soon. We got idiot and moron from the same medical textbooks as “retarded”.
Gen B squeakers will start calling people “profoundly/severely disabled” in COD 2k35 and the cycle will be born anew.
this game is fucking PROFOUNDLY DISABLED rage quits
Bury your mail with your dead relatives. Good idea.
The movie Tropic Thunder is what pushed it over the edge
In 1882, this event would have been called Swing For Imbeciles
Dullards
Macaroni Heads
I don’t think you should swing for the committee member with a golf club no matter what you think about them
Only the preferred word has changed
