i can only speak for my experience. growing up autistic, i was targeted due to my different ways of thinking and acting for bullying, using the r-word to belittle and demean me, far too many times, for hearing it used to mean ‘bad’ to feel like anything but an attack on me or those like me. when someone uses the r-word casually, it hurts, and a fully automatic system, borne of hard experience, files that person away as a probable threat. i don’t understand why people want to use the word so badly, knowing it hurts people, and knowing it’s not necessary or even all that useful of a word.
It is much worse as it implies that they are disabled due to there extremely low intelligence. The word by itself isn’t bad but you shouldn’t call someone retarded.
I believe it comes from the metal retardation diagnosis from 70 years ago or so.
What about the word is offensive?
Is it just as offensive as calling someone stupid, moronic, dumb, or an idiot?
Is it that insulting someone’s intelligence is inherently offensive? Or is it just that it’s one of the most recent to become medically obsolete?
i can only speak for my experience. growing up autistic, i was targeted due to my different ways of thinking and acting for bullying, using the r-word to belittle and demean me, far too many times, for hearing it used to mean ‘bad’ to feel like anything but an attack on me or those like me. when someone uses the r-word casually, it hurts, and a fully automatic system, borne of hard experience, files that person away as a probable threat. i don’t understand why people want to use the word so badly, knowing it hurts people, and knowing it’s not necessary or even all that useful of a word.
It is much worse as it implies that they are disabled due to there extremely low intelligence. The word by itself isn’t bad but you shouldn’t call someone retarded.
I believe it comes from the metal retardation diagnosis from 70 years ago or so.
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But calling someone an idiot is explicitly insulting their intelligence just the same.