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?
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.
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).
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! 🗣️🗣️🔥
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
retarded doesn’t have any more negative meaning than disabled. it’s just about how we use it.
I mean, they are disabled! This whole “differently abled” is completely out of touch with reality.
Only the preferred word has changed
