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Up From The Slime's avatar

History lesson:

In the 19th century, people with mental disabilities were called cretins, imbeciles, and idiots. By the early 20th century, this became a formal classification: idiots, whose mental age never exceeds that of a typical two-year-old; imbeciles, whose mental age never exceeds that of a seven-year-old; and morons, whose mental age never exceeds that of a twelve-year-old. Cretinism became a specific term for congenital hypothyroidism, leading to a syndrome that includes cognitive disability.

Of course, these terms became insults in popular vernacular for anyone who does or says something stupid. Bugs Bunny was fond of saying of inept adversaries, "What a maroon!" That's clearly not a reference to escaped Haitian slaves, but a variation on "moron." More recently, Ren Hoek of Ren & Stimpy had frequent outbursts at Stimpy the Cat, calling him an "eediot."

Because some well-meaning people thought they could end the hurt behind the use of these words by banning the words, they were replaced with the concept of developmental rates. The accepted terminology became "mental retardation" to reflect that these persons were just, as the euphemism goes, "slow." The truth is that many people with such disabilities are not just slow to develop intellectually, but incapable of developing beyond certain limitations.

"Retarded" was the politically correct term for such people in the mid-20th century. But of course, "retarded" and "retard" entered the vernacular as insults. This spawned an ongoing struggle to find an acceptable term for cognitive and intellectual disabilities: developmentally disabled, developmentally challenged, developmentally delayed (note that "delayed" is a direct synonym of "retarded"), mentally challenged, and so on.

The issue isn't the words. If you want to put someone down by calling them profoundly, inherently stupid, you will use whatever term people currently used for the developmentally disabled - even "special."

The point of controlling the words is to attempt to control people's ability to think, as with Orwellian Newspeak. If you can relegate the population to a constant scramble to keep up with the right words on pain of ostracism, you can keep them from questioning the control you have over them - even as you expand and extend that control to all aspects of their lives. In effect, you reduce them, to (in the words of MAD Magazine) a gang of idiots.

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Brandy's avatar

The problem with this approach is that there is no mass public input. Before referring to moms as birthing people, shouldn't someone ask moms if this is okay with them? And, then you have people like my husband who works 12 to 16 hours a day. He depends on me to keep him informed of IMPORTANT matters. He has no time or energy for trivial word games. He's in the beginning stages of building up a business, so he has dedicated his time to that pursuit. Now, let's say one of these hall monitors comes in to his business and he unknowingly uses a word he's always used. In some circles, that is cause to destroy him, his business, his family, and his good-hearted nature. Why? What good does that do? Lots of people will lose their job because he can barely hold his eyes open long enough to even remember what day it is. It's ridiculous and people who do this to others are the ones who should be shunned. They obviously have too much time on their hands.

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