To counter the explosion of "fuck you" kind of comments, and as the father of a child with a developmental disability, thank you for pointing out this impolite and linguistically lazy behavior.
People who use "retarded", "gay", "autistic", "ghetto" (and so on) in a derogatory form are showing a lack of imagination, aren't introspective enough to consider how their choice of words makes others perceive them, and trivialize an entire group of people by subordinating them in their effort to demean someone else.
And that's the problem. It's condescending (and meant to be, don't tell me it's not) to call someone or something "retarded" when one is actually expressing an opinion that the person or thing is not worthy of merit, and history is rife with abuses that result from trivializing a group of people by distilling that group to a pejorative. "Fuck those short sighted motherfuckers," may shock because of the direct use of the glorious and multitalented root word "fuck", but it certainly isn't trivializing a group of people with a minor vision impairment, because short sighted is not the term used to refer to someone who is near sighted. It's borderline lazy, sure. It may offend someone's sensibilities, yeah. But choosing a word that one knows damn well trivializes a group of disadvantaged human beings ... that's profoundly different from dropping the occasional F-bomb.
It's not about political correctness, it's about recognizing that one's choice of words can carry a great deal of meaning that diminishes the intended effect of those words. In some cases, by literally dehumanizing a group of people.
It's not "colorful language", it's lazy and careless prose.
And to any current reader of this comment who thinks such pejorative language is okay in civilized company: either this post changes your mind, dear reader, or it doesn't. Using what you think to be clever analogies, closed-minded logical fallacies, or meritless affirmative defenses ("but, freedom of speech!") is encouraged, if it makes you feel better about yourself to put me in my place for feeling the way I do about this kind of language. Your right to free speech is no different from mine, I won't stop you. But I also won't waste the expression of my free speech rights by trying to argue with someone who doesn't acknowledge that maybe ... maybe ... they're wrong, so please feel free to satisfy that desire to get in the last word.
I personally am aware of zero instances where anyone associated with a developmental disability is comfortable with the use of the word 'retarded', in any context. (Please note: this is not to say such a thing does not exist!) Empathy is a worthy reason for voluntarily restricting my personal speech, and I appreciate others willing to take people like you into consideration here on this forum!
I'll take you at your word that you're not trying to be clever, and that you're genuinely curious, and thus not interested in an argument that must be won. And, so, I'll do my best to elucidate in an attempt to satisfy that curiosity.
I suspect that the poster is referring to the whole of his experience as the pool of contexts in question, and thus can state that he knows of no one who is comfortable with the word choice - given that most people don't use the word "retarded" as the past tense of the verb "retard", which means to hold back or slow down, I'm inclined to agree.
Retardant is not in question. The use of retard as a verb as it's intended to be used is not in question. The vast majority of utterances of "retarded" are used as a pejorative adjective, so while I see your point, I think you're missing his: The reality is that the adjective form of retarded is, in nearly all common-use cases, a careless diminution of those with developmental or learning disabilities, as it serves to suggest the idea/thing/person could only have come from someone with such a developmental or learning disability.
>when one is actually expressing an opinion that the person or thing is not worthy of merit, and history is rife with abuses that result from trivializing a group of people by distilling that group to a pejorative.
What I don't quite understand is why it trivializes people to use a disability as a pejorative, but it apparently doesn't trivialize people to use a disease as a pejorative.
Since you don't seem to be arguing, I would like to understand what you mean? Did I use such a pejorative? I'd sincerely like to know - if, that is, your query is sincere as well.
I'm just musing, and hoping someone might have an explanation. Language is complicated, and emotionally-loaded words are especially so.
Let me put it this way. If I call someone cancerous, I'm not trivializing the group of people that have cancer and distilling them to a pejorative. In general, if I use a disease as an insult it's fine, but if I use a disability as an insult it's usually offensive. They're both afflictions, but they're treated differently in uncountable ways.
I could list some reasons, but none of them really feel like they get at the root cause of the difference. Do you have any insight?
Perhaps it's related to self-identification? People don't self-identify as cancerous, the cancer (or disease?) is an external actor invading the body. Whereas a disability is a feature or aspect of one's body.
(I don't have first hand experience with either, so I'm just musing too..)
I'm sorry, I did not mean to offend anybody but my reading of the word is that it has two meanings, one of which is 'stupid or dumb'. I'll update the comment.
At the same time I see HN slide towards reddit just one little bit more with all the 'you insensitive clod' comments lately and that is sad too.
If you don't want HN to slide that way, then I suggest you not give in and change it back. After all, I think offense is entirely in the mind of the beholder.
I think it's worse than that, it's sliding towards Metafilter, where half the conversation is derailed by meta comments and whether it's appropriate to talk a certain way.
It's less about HN vs. reddit and more about society at large. What sorts of rude and derogatory words do you feel the need to say where you can't pick a synonym?
I speak quite a few languages, and most of them badly, good enough for communications needs but not precise enough to win me any literary prizes. If we were having this discussion in Dutch I would definitely not pick on you for using words that may not be precise enough or that might be offensive to you simply because I'd assume that you must have learned your Dutch from other people speaking it and using it in your vicinity, coupled with media such as movies, books and so on.
I've seen the word 'retarded' used in the exact way I used it above in many places and I've checked the dictionary and it has a simply secondary definition ('Dumb, foolish') which is roughly what I intended to convey.
Since giving offense is not one of my pet hobbies I edited my comment but had the situation been reversed I would have definitely afforded you more leeway.
To me 'retarded' did not seem rude or derogatory until you pointed it out, judging by the number of other people that are actually native speakers that use it in that exact same way it seems to me that you have your work cut out for you.
I can appreciate the language barrier and I thank you for changing it when I pointed it out.
As for having my work cut out for me, I definitely expected this to happen (maybe not to this scale). HN tends to attract the kind of person who thinks that anything is fair to say any time, regardless of who it might hurt, because HN tends to attract people of massive privilege, many of whom have never been the victim of societal discrimination.
This could go two ways. One way would be where people appreciate your efforts and change their tone. Another way this could go is that people will stop participating. Either way you will likely get what you want.
By the way, "dumb" means unable to speak, or mute. Using "dumb" as a synonym for stupid is as offensive as using "retarded" as a synonym for idiotic. Which, in my opinion, is not at all.
It's certainly isn't as bad as an ethnic slur, but I feel strongly that it shouldn't be used in polite conversation. It's a matter of being considerate to your audience.
> A survey by Mencap of people with a learning disability has found that nearly nine out of ten respondents have experienced bullying in the last year. Two-thirds are bullied on a regular basis and almost one-third are suffering from bullying on a daily or weekly basis. People with a learning disability face prejudice and widespread discrimination that often makes them feel like outcasts and prevents them from taking a full part in society. Public attitudes in the United Kingdom towards people with a learning disability remain discriminatory. The Mencap survey suggests that the bullying of people with a learning disability is institutionalised throughout society.
How they described bullying:
> The following behaviours were most frequently cited: kicking, biting, name-calling, teasing, stealing, pushing, threatening, having things thrown at you, being told to leave a building, hitting, being shouted at, swearing, demanding money, hair-pulling, throwing stones, spitting, poking, being punched, being beaten up, having one’s head banged against the wall.
I did not contest the facts. But not using the word retard won't help any way. They face prejudice and discrimination because of their condition, not of the way said condition is called. And if we change the word with other - the other word will still be used as an insult. Because the condition itself is highly undesirable. No one wants to have it.
But simply not wanting to be inflicted with a condition is no excuse to dehumanize people who are. Perhaps part of the problem is simply people mocking eachother for being different, but another part of the problem is the cultural normalcy of abuse promulgated by linking diagnostic terms with definitions of global inferiority. Language is the very matrix from which thought arises, so real-world usage of words can alter people's perceptions.
> Call it what it actually is: short sighted, greedy, foolish, etc. Don't use a word that puts down people with disabilities.
No. Language is a liging thing and the meaning of a word can change overtime.
"Greedy" is not the word that applies in this case. Nor is "short sighted". This is a retarted and dangerous behavior, and you should not be afraid to call it for what it is.
See above example with the car and try to imaging is the following happened: you have to drive immediately to a hospital and your car doesn't start because your tire was changed by a non-authorized service.
"Greedy" and "short sighted" are not the words that come in mind. It's a trully retarted and dangerous decision, initially driven by greed (because let's make computers like black boxes, no-one can open it, no-one can mess with it).
What makes you think it's driven by greed?There is absolutely zero evidence for this assumption, and the alternative explanation - that it is a poorly implemented attempt to keep their promises about the security of Touch ID makes perfect sense.
But that's not the same definition as the word he used. Fire/flame retardant basically means "fire delayer" Run that through the original sentence and it becomes nonsensical: "It's totally 'delayed' that a functioning phone is bricked by an update".
In my dictionary it coild also be It's toally backwards that.... Does it make sense now?
Fire retardant example was to show you that the same word can be used in many context and not all of them have anything to do with offendong handicapped people. oh wait that word is now also politically incorrect.
People with learning disabilities face significant levels of violence and discrimination.
People with short sightedness, not so much.
No one kills a person who is short sighted just because they are short sighted, but this routinely happens to people with learning disability. Not just random fuckheads in public, but doctors will put people with LD under DNR orders without the knowledge or permission of the person or their relatives just because that person has LD and the doctor can't imagine any quality of life.
Absolutely. There are jobs that discriminate against people with eyesight disabilities (some aircraft pilot jobs, for
example) and there are many products that don't account for people wearing glasses.
People with glasses are widely stereotyped as nerds or geeks and often experience bullying.
People wearing glasses were also reportedly targeted in mass killings by the Khmer Rouge due to that same stereotype.
Physical ability and job qualifications are a central issue in the debate about discrimination in hiring. It's not just limited to disabilities, since the same debate has repeatedly taken place around the issue of whether women are physically qualified for certain jobs, as can be seen in the current debate over whether women are physically qualified for special operations roles in the US military.
Would you consider it discrimination if, for example, consumers are more likely to be influenced by a white athlete spokesman than a black one? And so, the white ones gets paid more?
<irony>
Because wearing glasses makes me feel insecure.
</irony>
Yes, a person with disabilities can be ridiculed and feel like crap. A fat one can too. Also one with glasses, long hair, or long nose (or very short, let's include them too, it's the PC thing to do).
Where do you draw the "disadvantage" line?
As much as you are being offended when people are using a series of letters that forms certain words, so do I when people act like irresponsible children putting blame on random words.
It's not about ridicule. It's not about offence. Why do people always make this same point about offence?
"My freedom of speech allows me to say what I like; FUCK YOU if you want to use your freedom of speech to tell me how much harm my words cause"
People with LD have been subjected to genocidal actions; they've been forcibly sterilised (without their (or their family's) knowledge or permission; they've been used as the subjects of harmful medical experimentation (again, without knowledge or permission); they often find themselves under DNR (without knowledge or permission); they face levels of bullying higher than other other group; they face levels of discrimination higher than any other group; this bullying and discrimination is bad enough when it comes from people in society, but it's often coming from care professionals; they are deliberately excluded from most of society who know nothing about LD.
> researchers found that participants showed less tolerance toward people who were referred to as "the mentally ill" when compared to those referred to as "people with mental illness."
> For example, participants were more likely to agree with the statement "the mentally ill should be isolated from the community" than the almost identical statement "people with mental illnesses should be isolated from the community."
> These results were found among [...] and even professional counselors who took part in the study.
> "My freedom of speech allows me to say what I like; FUCK YOU if you want to use your freedom of speech to tell me how much harm my words cause"
But they can say FUCK YOU to people who say things they don't like because that's freedom of speech too. Then those people can say FUCK YOU back and have a whole steaming flame war. It's all speech. It may not be productive, and you may not want to participate in it, but there is no law preventing anybody from doing it.
It's only when somebody passes a law against it that it becomes an affront to free speech.
Wow. It's 2016, and you're still saying bigoted words like "fool." My great grandfather was a court jester, and he was a very intelligent man. Why don't you read up on the history of tyrants and entertainment before you go throwing around such hateful speech.
Using the word retard victimises a group that is already significantly marginalised while simultaneously not doing much to the intended victim. The word has a greater affect on unintended, innocent, victims than the intended target.
If you're talking about IQ less than 70 use whatever is relevant in the country you're in. In the US this is usually intellectual disability (which is a subset of learning disability, which in US also includes eg dyslexia which doesn't have IQ requirement), but for some small groups it might be retard (although other groups see that as hate speech.)
If you're talking about a difficult to understand action call it dumb or stupid or idiotic or almost anything but retarded.
In the UK the word retard is pretty much equivalent to kikes or nigger or faggot. I'm not sure people in the US recognise that when they say retard people outside the US see a word like nigger. If that's the level of offence you want to create then sure, go ahead.
> Using the word retard victimises a group that is already significantly marginalised while simultaneously not doing much to the intended victim. The word has a greater affect on unintended, innocent, victims than the intended target.
That clearly isn't what the word means today.
"Our son was having trouble in school and his counsellor suspected he might be retarded. We brought him to a retard house with a reputation for taking good care of the retards and the doctor said that he was, indeed, retarded."
That's the sort of thing you might have heard in 1905 but not today. It means something different now. Which is why it's now inappropriate when applied to a person with a learning disability. But the target isn't a person with a learning disability, it's a multinational corporation. The point isn't that Apple has a learning disability, it's that they're being retarded. There isn't another word that means quite exactly that.
It's essentially the same argument as the people who say not to use the word hysterical because of its history. That's not what it means anymore.
I haven't heard the word "retarded" used in earnest to refer to intellectual disability (the replacement term) for at least a decade, and probably closer to 15 years. Note that this is a textbook case of the euphemism treadmill, where whatever term is used to intellectual disability eventually starts getting used as an insult and thus the term is changed. Eventually the old retired terms become fairly acceptable as insults, like "idiot" and "moron."
> If that's the level of offence you want to create then sure, go ahead.
WTF? Did you make that all up just to be able to put me down? Really, what a disgusting comment. I used a word that has a dual definition according to my goddamn dictionary and asked politely for an alternative and reason and edited my comment long before you posted this and yet you feel that you should use this to pretend that I like to create a certain level of offense when I clearly went out of my way not to.
Almost very proposed alternative means somethig exactly equivalent to "retarded", a medical word for a disability. It's a euphemism treadmill.
Dumb = mute
Idiot, moron = low IQ
Lame = non-functioning limb
The problem is not choice of words, the problem is insulting someone by calling them "low intelligence" instead of short-sighted (oops! That's a visual disability) or careless or selfish or unimaginative or impatient.
you can't say anything anymore without qualifying it to the nth degree and sugarcoating it and making it as bland as possible, just in case someone somewhere feels that some thing you said was some how offending
I find the way racism become THE WORST THING in the world wildly amusing. There are 7 000 000 000 people on the planet and all of them are racist. We people are wired to dislike people not like us.
Not sure what you are asking exactly (is that rethorical? Or do you expect a real answer?).
If you really care :-) :
I had the chance to be raised and still live in a very mixed part of Paris. There is racism, of course, and for example I can remember how kids of Portuguese descent were the object of mockery back when I was young. (That's significant because today it's put under the carpet as if it never occurred. It seems nobody even remember!).
That makes you think about bias, how bias turn into systematic racism, etc. That makes you discover how people of course cluster around commonalities but also like to share and connect with others when given a safe context.
Racism is quite pervasive in France, and for example younger generations make it a central part of their dialogue and jokes. But many people are working toward inclusiveness too.
Just like women equality and wealth sharing, non-discrimination is not solved thing in any given society: it's a constant challenge to tackle, probably without an end in sight.
It's probably the same for individuals: how can I be more inclusive? Less biased toward others?
I know a couple of Dutch people that moved to Portugal. Surprise, even after living there for 30 years they are still openly discriminated against. My guess would be that such discrimination is so much a part of human nature that (sadly) if you put two people from one group and one from another in a room you'll instantly set off a whole slew of innate responses resulting in the two siding against the one.
It's sad but that seems to be the state of affairs and I don't expect this to get any better in the next couple of centuries. Barring an alien invasion that gives us a reason to play 'us' against 'them' on a bigger stage I doubt humanity will be able to really overcome this particular hurdle. Which is sad because it is a large driver behind all the violence and misery in the world.
I think in practice it takes a certain level of sophistication and intelligence to understand, and be self-aware to the impacts of, racism. I have observed that it is very easy (if not entirely unnecessary) to convert higher IQ members of society to think in ways that are more equitable than race. Do you believe much progress has been made with those who are (to this day) perpetuating the racism? I think there is more awareness, but is there less racism? I also feel that certain "races" are being discriminated against (ie. Asians entrance average to Universities must be much higher than other races, due to competition). This seems to elicit less attention from those who are social justice inclined. I apologize for original message, came off colder than intended.
Given that he is engaging you intellectually and not engaging you with the lizard half of his brain (with it's large stick), I'd say quite successfully.
A) Any historybook ever. There was never a point in history in which purple didn't try to slaughter green for green being green.
B) Everything. Me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin. Me and my cousin against the world. Likeness could be anything that a person deems important. Race, religion, football teams, harry potter vs lotr, dota vs lol.
>There are 7 000 000 000 people on the planet and all of them are racist.
Even if that was true, which it isn't, why do you think that means we should give up and speak or write carelessly? Why do you object to improvement/progress?
You can't use pejoratives against people's ethnicity or mental/physical disability in polite society. That's not the same as being actually oppressed, sorry.
