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  • It's funny because moron used to be a medical term as well.

    • These actually had distinction:

      Defectives was generally the term prior to like 1845, which is when Howe published “on the causes of idiocy”. That led to more classification

      Idiot was what we could call severe intellectual disability. Requiring 24 hour care but some muscular control, cognitive, and speech capabilities. Use was phased out in the late 19th century because it had become pejorative

      Fool was a subcategory of idiot with more significant impairment of reasoning and speech skills. This became pejorative and was phased out.

      Simpleton was moderate intellectual disability. Some degree of functioning, capacity for speech, motor and reasoning skills, but required assistance with tasks. This also become pejorative and was phased out (see a pattern). This was replaced with several terms, including feeble minded, imbecile, and moron, which were also in turn phased out.

      at one point in the 19th century there was a distinction when symptoms of dementia set in. If you got what we would now call early onset dementia, it was called “amentia”. By the early 20th century “ament” was kind of a catch all for “idiots, imbeciles, and feeble minded”

      There was also “cretin” which was originally supposed to be a kindness for all intellectually disabled people as it means “Christian” in French or something, but it also became pejorative

      Another super racist one was mongoloid/mongolism which was specifically for Down’s syndrome. This is because, no joke, John Down thought people with down syndrome looked like Mongolians. His reward for his racism was the condition bears his name forever, apparently. This was only changed because Mongolia had to petition the WHO to change it because it was offensive

      Imo instead of policing language we should maybe recognize that the intentionality behind the use of these terms is what the problem is.

      Saying the word “retarded” does not have to be inherently offensive. Describing something that is slowed or hindered as retarded is accurate. Using retarded as a pejorative term makes you a dick, sure. But if I go through all the effort to change “retarded” to “intellectually disabled” guess what happens? The same thing that has happened for the past 175+ years. The people who have used the terms in the pejorative sense will quickly adapt, making your efforts to police language pointless unless you intended to enrich their lexicon.

      If you consider actions that could actually be meaningful for the individual it would be something that would address the harm caused by pejorative use. That’s a challenging road to go down (imagine criminal penalties: middle schools would be ghost towns!). we want to feel like we do something though so we instead do this, which is pointless.

      That said if the disorder was named by an old racist based on his racism then by all means change it up but maybe don’t memorialize him when you do it. That doesn’t come up as much anymore, thankfully

      • Saying the word “retarded” does not have to be inherently offensive. Describing something that is slowed or hindered as retarded is accurate. Using retarded as a pejorative term makes you a dick, sure. But if I go through all the effort to change “retarded” to “intellectually disabled” guess what happens? The same thing that has happened for the past 175+ years. The people who have used the terms in the pejorative sense will quickly adapt, making your efforts to police language pointless unless you intended to enrich their lexicon.

        I have addressed this argument elsewhere in this post, but please forgive me rehashing the message here, because your comment is prominent, informative, and based in historical fact.

        The word "retard" was used and is used to cause harm to vulnerable people. So was idiot, cretin, and moron. The difference is it is the last and likely immortalized step of this particular euphemism treadmill.

        The treadmill appears to have stopped. There is no one-size-fits-all diagnosis to replace “mental retardation” because that was a terrible diagnosis 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 the word “idiot”.

        Will other diagnostic terms be weaponized? Certainly. Will they ever be as prevalent or as ignorant in their origin and usage? Unlikely. I certainly hope not. And each new vernacular replacement is more awkward and holds less power than the last. That’s why you’re not here defending any term that came after this one.

        That's why - despite you mentioning it specifically as a spiritual successor to the word "retarded" - "intellectually disabled" is not successfully replacing it. It doesn't bear the same emotional connotations, it never experienced the same popularity, and it shows no signs of ever coming close. Is it used in problematic ways, by people in good faith and bad? Yes. But terms like it are unlikely to ever even approach the moral repugnance of "retard" because they won't carry quite the same history of professional ignorance and casual abuse.

        The word "retard" - alone among these ableist terms we're discussing - will forever bear the moral weight of all of them. Because it will be remembered as the last term used to humiliate and exclude a vulnerable group of people by a society that should have known better. A society that should have done better. A society that still needs to do better.

        Other terms won't be promoted to the same level of societal consciousness, because they hopefully won't be promoted to the same level of professional malpractice at such a staggering scale. The word was misused and caused harm by doctors, and parents, and peers, some who used the word in good faith and watched helplessly as it became twisted, and others who used the word from a place of ignorance and later learned how much harm could be done by a simple word.

        By a diagnostic label that was never enough to even describe the people it hurt, let alone help them.

        Is it okay to use the term for purposes other than causing pain and perpetuating discrimination against vulnerable people? No. Because those vulnerable people are still alive and with us, and those wounds are still fresh. Will it ever be okay, long after they're gone? Perhaps, but probably not.

        The word's abandonment will be a milestone on a path fraught with systemic and systematic abuses, and will probably never recover it's original meaning. But that's okay, because language constantly evolves, and we have plenty of old words to say what we mean, and we will find plenty of new ones along the way.

        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, while also knowing that there is still so much more work to be done.

132 comments