Why is retard bad

There are certain words that just should not be said. This is one of them. Actually, retard means slow, as in slow progression of the brain, so that is why it has grown to be offensive. In music, retard means to slow down, and many people laugh at this when they see it, which is very wrong and ignorant.

So, saying retard is like calling someone, or yourself for, slow-progressing which is very offensive. Its not a matter of speed of learning, its about its a matter of limited cognitive function. I think the 30 sec video is apples to oranges and context does matter. The context and way we use words make them offensive, not necessarily the word itself.

By the way, my nephew,uncle, and son to be are and will be disabled. Just my thought and I respect your point of view also. I completely agree with you, it is your intent when you use words that could be offensive. This is exactly how I feel about this word. To make slow, etc… I understand that the slang for the word is very hurtful, but rarely do I ever hear it used in such a way.

Personally, I rarely if ever use the word, but I am not insulted when people use it with the meaning of being slow. In my opinion, every single human on this planet is slow in one form or another. It can apply to all of us. My son was born with Down Syndrome and he is well respected by all. He will be entering the sixth grade this year and has numerous typical friends. By the way, Noah is adorable and you are wonderful parents.

Thanks for sharing. But they are easily corrected. Once that evidence it pointed out to them, they usually fess up. Janet, I understand what you are trying to say but I never hear someone using that word in a serious way as you describe. It is always used as mockery. Comparing a foolish act or person to another person who has a disability. Please give me an example of how you use the word in a way that is not implying that a person with a disability is foolish or stupid.

Thank you! A very excellent and accurate comment. The use of retard as a noun has always highlighted the users deficiencies versus the persom the user is trying to insult. It all depends on ones use of the word. When looking it up in the Webster Miriam dictionary, this is one of the meanings:. There is nothing derogatory about the above sentence, nor should anyone interpret it that way. I think as a society we have become far too sensitive and people must walk on eggshells for fear of insulting someone.

Then, a couple of weeks after that it was National Siblings Day. All day I watched my FB friends post photos of their brothers and sisters and how much they love them.

I have no siblings, and my younger sister passed away after heart surgery as an infant. Did the posts make me a little sad? Of course. But do I expect others to NOT put them up for fear of hurting of someone like me?

Well of course not!! I think we all need to lighten up a little. Unless something is blatantly rude or done with the intent of hurting someone, just let it pass. I agree with you. I would never apply the term to a human being. The thing I find so redicules about this arguement is that some time in the near future, those that were once called idiots, then mentally retarded, moving to mentally challenged, and currently referred to as Intellectually or developmentally disabled, or differently abled will someday be refered to by a new term making the acceptable, unacceptable, again.

My belief comes from personal experience since my dad, my son and I all sit somewhere on the Autism Spectrum. You nailed it. And your position mirrors mine. I totally agree. I am amazed how ignorant people can be. You know your true friends when they correct their behavior. Thank you so much for this video clip!

Have a great night! Hey, I just wanted to let you know how completely beautiful this website is, your articles are amazing and moving. So thank you, so much. Hi my name is Heather Light. I have some special needs. So please stop using it. From Heather Light. And you are an undereducated poor soul who has no idea how to use the gift of language to properly express yourself.

I always tell my kids, one of whom has special needs, that communicating properly is a lost art and that is shows more intelligence to speak your point while refraining to lower yourself to include vulgarities. Those who have not had the proper education will revert to vulgarities as a means to get their point across because they know no better.

Point in case, your missive! Not so much now to not offend And many people I know do. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. Learning slower than average has never been a negative thing to me. I think we ALL fall under the description of that word in different areas of our lives. I hate the the DS community is so offended by it.

I wish we could teach these beautiful children not to be offended by it. I appriciate this blog post very much.. I have a 6 year old Jasmine who experiences downs syndrome also.

I too used this word without thought for many years and do not use it anymore, but the change has not been easy, in fact I feel for people when they use it and do not mean anything bad by it. Like I sid though, the change is hard. I once made a terrible mistake.. It is important to educate with love and not to condem or create hurt feelings.

I also am a college student and I have written many a paper and since I was in a public speaking class at the time, my final speach was about the R word. It seems like just a word, but it cant hurt to pick another one if this one hurts anybody…there are enough other choices in the english language…. I hope others will try. I hear from a lot of people that it is only a word, or they believe in freedom of speech. I, too, used the word a lot without meaning to offend anyone. When my son was born with Ds, I started to look for resources and came across the campaign to end the word.

I try not to judge when I hear it from others, but I do explain that it is offensive and there are a ton of other words that they can use that will not offend. You can stop punishing yourself, because you obviously learned something from that experience, and it has made you a better person.

Thanks for sharing your story. If we all work together, it will happen one day. I used it, like you, without even thinking about what it really means. How ignorant of me. Thanks for posting! I agree that a polite person would try to eliminate offensive speech from their vocabulary. When I was young they were referred to as mentally retarded with subgroups referring to how independent they were expected to eventually become.

He and his friends were always calling each other retarded or retard-just casual ribbing of youth, and I think my son was kind of proud of it? But turns out his son who is now 6 has autism. Indeed it gives a whole new perspective to the word! It was a word that was used so frequently growing up. When I was in college, I began to realize the problem with using it.

I do catch myself say it from time to time, but I think it is when I hear it. I just revert to old bad habits. Every time. But from time to time, I catch myself repeating it.

You just have to WANT to change. My family finds the term offense, because it is generally used in a negative connotation — even if the person using it does not intentionally mean to insult someone personally. Many have used it in the past without realizing it is discriminatory, but when most people have a child or other family member with a intellectual disability, it hits home and we realize how hurtful it is to the individual and their family and friends.

It is insulting and falls into the same category as racial slurs — we may have grown up not realizing how very inappropriate and hurtful they were to use, but as a society most of us have come to understand how unacceptable they are in a civilized world.

I urge folks to think a little more about the effect before they throw the word around carelessly. As parents we need to set a better example for our children, including putting a stop to bullying in our schools and communities. No child deserves to be bullied. And, keep up the good work Noah. I have written before regarding my sons disability which includes skeletal problems,retardation, several deformities which he was born with but had surgeries to correct them or make less noticable.

He does the flapping with his arms and is non-verbal. I took him out to a restaraunt once when he was maybe 4 or 5 yrs. That was such a blow to my mom and aunt and myself. Just then i realized how ignorant or uneducated people are regarding disabilities. All i could do was pray for that couple that God would show them the light. It was hurtful to say the least. Since then, when my son is with me,and people stare or point I just smile.

My sons name is AJ and he is 25 now:. I was so glad to read this post on your blog. I am a recent college graduate so no children in my life yet. The reason I so passionately follow your blog is because of my huge involvement in Best Buddies International while I was in college including being on the student board. I am always inspired by your stories. God bless! Thankfully, my mom taught me not to use that word when I was a kid.

She told me that it was a derogatory term. I hate the r word. I was non verbal until age 4, and semi non verbal until almost age 6, and predicted originally that I would probably never speak, and then that I would probably never exceed the mental capacity of a 10 to 11 year old. Words in general, need to be used more carefully. Words have meaning and can be used to hurt or love, to build up, or tear down, to build bridges, or burn them.

This is a moving article. Like you, I have uttered those cruel words. Though at the time I never thought of them as hate words. I was a kid and of course I never said it in front o my mom.

From the time I was 21 till earlier this year i am 40 now I had the honor and privilege to work with the mentally and physically disabled.

From babies to way into adulthood. My language and my focused changed. I hate the R word. On outing with my participants I would get so angry at the stares people would give. But in the end I would realize you change others by example. So by laughing with my participants, talking to the, showing the world.

Noah is a lucky little guy to have you in his corner. May God continue to bless you and your family. Thanks so much for posting this! Since beginning volunteer work with disabled children and starting my studies as an occupational therapist, I picked up on just how often I used the word and made a conscious effort to stop. I admit that it was harder than I thought it would be- it seems to have somehow been ingrained into our societies everyday vocabulary and needs to be stopped. Also, thanks so much for starting up this website- I only just stumbled across it, doing some research for a study on DS.

No, simply because I never use it about people except spammers and negative trolls. So sue me. I thought you would like to know that the R word is used on p. As this book is used as a textbook in studies for sociology, economics, and business degrees the book has a wide audience. You might like to contact the author and the publisher about the insult and harm caused by using the offensive word.

Could someone help? Any suggestions welcome. I have a family member whose sister is handicapped and it seems everyone says the R word at some point, so they started using a made up word in its place…redumbtious.

You never know, you may actually mess up and say it in front of a special person and hurt their feelings without meaning to. Thank you for trying to inform people of using derogatory speech. I have spent my life with people with disabilities. My sisters were born retarded. Then we started saying, our sisters have retardation. Always remember it is the person first not the label.

We want people to go to school, get their education, and go to work. When you see people who have severe disabilities, people will laugh at them, or call them the R-word, or make fun of them.

I have a perfect example of someone saying something offensive to me. People are more understanding about disability than they used to be, I think things are improving but there is a long way to go. People who have dyslexia can live a normal life, but they see things totally differently from people who can read because it mucks them up.

Dyslexia can cause so much trouble for me, and if I heard someone say anything negative about dyslexia, I would just walk away from it. Everyone is different. If you need to talk to someone about bullying or a crisis in your life, please consider calling Lifeline on 13 11 14, beyondblue on 22 , or the Kids Helpline on 55 Previous Back. Disabled vs disability. Which is right? Being something of a word person, I was fascinated by the reaction the words got when we told friends and family about the diagnosis.

Honestly, I think I had to spend more time talking to people about the terminology than the condition it describes. Even the Wikipedia entry begins with a long discussion of the various terms that have been used and discarded over the years—discarded after common usage coopted a clinical term for use as an insult. I confess that sounds a bit jargony to me. I am seeing that term used quite a bit online, on special-needs forums and such. Four years later, I'm hearing "cognitive disability" more often in educational contexts, and "mental retardation" is still what the medical records say, with a gradual shift toward "ID.

I don't look at my son and think a label. His brain works differently than is the norm although "the norm" is mighty hard to pin down. Abstract concepts sometimes baffle him, but he certainly knows an insult when he hears one.

And all over the internet, in movies, and at the playground, people are still using "retarded" and "retard" in disparaging or eye-rolling ways. It's time to stop.

Christopher Fairman, a professor at Ohio State's law school, literally wrote the book on the word fuck. His book, Fuck , is a historical, political and legal account of how the word became taboo—and why, in his view, it shouldn't be. Fairman, who died last year, felt the same about the word retarded. His article on the topic was published in The Washington Post in February , the month before Tim Shriver's Special Olympics launched a special awareness day for its "Spread the Word to End the Word" campaign, and months before President Obama signed legislation officially removing the word from federal legal-ese.

Just a couple weeks before Fairman's piece was published, Rahm Emanuel, then the White House chief of staff, had apologized to Shriver and people with disabilities everywhere after The Wall Street Journal reported that Emanuel had called a group "fucking retards" at a private meeting held the previous summer. Conservatives—usually the politically incorrect name-callers—had a field day with this one. A Democrat at the highest level of government dissing members of his own party with such language?

Things escalated, as Fairman explained, when former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who has a son with Down syndrome, "quickly took to Facebook to demand Emanuel's firing, likening the offensiveness of the R-word to that of the N-word.

Rush Limbaugh said he found nothing wrong with "calling a bunch of people who are retards, retards," and Palin rushed to his defense, saying Limbaugh had used the word satirically. Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert took her up on it, calling Palin an '[expletive] retard' and adding, with a smile: 'You see? It's satire! Can you see how the word ridiculous just doesn't begin to cover it? If the history of offensive terms in America shows anything, it is that words themselves are not the culprit; the meaning we attach to them is, and such meanings change dramatically over time and across communities.

He made a good case, mentioning how mental retardation was actually meant to supplant imbecile, moron, and idiot—in a good way. And he took issue with Palin's comparison of retard to the word nigger. And then he recounted a story in which a political staffer was forced to resign after using the term niggardly —an unfortunate choice of words, perhaps, but not technically an offensive choice. Niggardly means stingy or cheap and is supposedly derived from the Norse verb nigla.

The staffer was ultimately reinstated. Ultimately, Fairman argued, getting rid of the word retard won't get rid of the sentiment behind it. If the goal is to protect intellectually disabled individuals from put-downs and prejudice, it won't succeed. New words of insult will replace old ones. What are you supposed to say when one of your best friends calls and tells you that her baby has Down syndrome? I still don't know. I definitely didn't know when Sophie was born.

I'd get on the freeway and drive really fast and call my friends on my cellphone and tell them, one by one. Cute picture! How's Annabelle liking having a little sister? Sophie has Down syndrome. Sometimes there'd be sniffling on the other end.

This happened maybe half a dozen times before a friend stopped me, midsentence. At that point, I didn't even know the most popular stereotypes. My favorite reaction came from my best friend, Laurie Notaro.

I called her during one of my drives and broke the news straight out. She gasped and started crying, saying, "Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh Amy, I'm so sorry. Frankly, it seemed like an appropriate reaction to me. But her response obviously haunted Laurie, because later that day, I got an email:. Listen, I'm really embarrassed about our conversation this morning about Sophie. I didn't know what to say. And I've been thinking about her and you all morning, and I just want you to know that I said the wrong thing.

I mean, when I said that I was sorry about Sophie and Down syndrome, that just came tumbling out. Since then, I've realized it was a stupid thing to say, because Sophie is going to be fine. She's just going to be Sophie.