Saturday, January 25, 2014

The word: Retard

Overly sensitive people, leave now.

One of the things that kills me about political correctness is the inability of people to deal with the fact that other people use words to insult each other. Half of the time they are complaining about people using one word while they use other words to insult those same people. A bit hypocritical, but that's humanity.

Our word today is: Retard.

Retard comes from the term "mentally retarded' which is a term for significantly impaired cognitive functioning and deficits in two or more adaptive behaviors. Before the term mentally retarded - or just retarded - came into fashion, terms such as "idiot", "moron", "imbecile", and "cretin" were used to describe mentally handicapped people. 

Of course, using those words to describe someone whom they do not actually describe is a form of insult. And as we use a word more and more to insult people, the term shifts to try to move the insult away from people afflicted with disabilities. 

This is what we call a "euphemism treadmill," which basically means that as you come up with new terms to describe something to get away from the negative connotations of the old terms, the new terms will be gradually used as insults and you will keep coming up with new terms ad nauseam.   

Look, what it boils down to is that you can start calling mentally handicapped people "rainbow unicorns" and people will start calling each other rainbow unicorns as a form of insult. So just stop already. Instead of vainly trying to stay ahead of the name-calling game, how about you choose to ignore the insult and teach others to do the same?  

Do you get mad at every Disney movie out there? I can't count the number of times some cartoon character in my daughter's movies has called another character a moron, an imbecile, or an idiot. 

Being insulted is something you choose to do. If someone calls someone else a retard and you are insulted, it's because you choose to be insulted. Isn't life too short to be wasting so much of it being angry over being insulted by things that weren't even aimed at you? 

Now excuse me, I have to go slap some damn rainbow unicorn that is messing up my inventory.