MaxE wrote:
I haven't read all 16 pages of this thread, but has somebody made a distinction between the word "ret*d" as an epithet vs. "ret*d" as an adjective? Until fairly recently, it was considered perfectly acceptable to describe somebody whose primary disability is to have a low intellectual capacity, usually to the extent they cannot succeed in "regular" public school etc. Having a son in Special Olympics, I could identify a number of people I know who, it you look at them, would seem perfectly normal except you will sooner or later recognize their intellect is too far "below normal" for them to every be completely independent. In my state, there is a non-profit called "The Arc" and its name was originally an abbreviation for "The Association for ret*d Citizens" until 1992 when they dropped that. The only problem I have, is that nobody has yet come up with a simple but acceptable term to replace that. So 30 years ago, you could legitimately say a person was "ret*d" and it simply meant they had a primarily intellectual (as opposed to neurological, etc.) disability. Nowadays I wouldn't know a straightforward way to communicate the same thing except with some sort of overblown circumlocution.
To be fair the n-word was also perfectly acceptable to the point that Mark Twain's classics like Huckelberry Finn used it often. People evolve and times change.