“That’s retarded.”
So, you’re telling me that whatever inanimate object you’re calling “retarded” lacks intellectual understanding due to limited mental development? Last I checked, that word only applied to humans.
And when we do apply it to humans, it doesn’t become any nicer of a word. We often forget the seriousness of what we’re saying and that it can have a lasting impact on someone else.
I get it. We all get frustrated with life, and one of the most human things we can do to vent our anger at the world is name-calling. The word “retarded,” or the R-word as I’ve come to know it, is one of those words that we use all day, every day, without thinking about its offensiveness.
The R-word used to be the term for people lacking the mental capacities that others do at the same age. Mental retardation, now called intellectual disability due to the stigma of its previous name, often causes physical impairment and a lack of social development. Examples of genetic disorders that cause the symptoms associated with intellectual disability are Down syndrome and fetal alcohol syndrome.
I’m guilty of using the R-word myself. If something isn’t fair to me or doesn’t make any sense, I’m probably the first one to spit it out. But the instant I say it, I immediately regret it because I don’t know if there are people around me who have family or know someone who suffers from an intellectual disability. I don’t know if they’ll think I’m insulting them indirectly. My offense is directly followed by apologies to everyone in the vicinity for my thoughtlessness.
It’s really easy to forget that people with intellectual disabilities are still, in fact, people, and that using their condition to talk down to something or someone else isn’t right. Talking down to someone just because they aren’t as smart as you are is cruel, unjust and mean. Using the R-word to further degrade them is insulting to the person, as well as to the people who have to actually deal with mental impairments.
I’ve been around long enough to know that as a society, we’re really freaking insensitive. You can’t go around calling things and people retarded for basically no reason. There’s no logic behind calling an idea, place, object or person the R-word, especially when they haven’t been diagnosed as such.
There are people out there who have different lives because they were born genetically different. But just because they live what we consider to be less than normal lives doesn’t mean they are any less of a person. I have a lot of respect for someone who has mental disabilities and still achieves their goals. The thing that makes life harder for them is what, ultimately, makes them a stronger person.
There are plenty of other words we can use to describe the things that displease us. Using the R-word is just an indication that you need to expand your vocabulary. A teacher in high school once told me that using foul language means you lack the knowledge to come up with your own words to describe the situation. Using the R-word is no different. It’s unimaginative, base and ignorant.
Don’t take someone’s condition and use it to describe something you don’t like. It’d be nice if we could build people up instead of tearing them down, especially with such an insensitive word. The mentally handicapped are some of the kindest among us; they surely can’t appreciate their condition being used as a derogatory word.
The R-word started in medicine and died there, and it’s time we buried it and removed it from our everyday vocabulary.
