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I personally find the word zero percent offensive but other people do so I don’t say it. Being a decent person isn’t hard (which is what makes “anti-wokeness” so irritating - what does it cost you?) That said, as others have pointed out it is functionally identical, in origin and usage as “idiot, moron,” etc. I wonder if there is any possibility that the current value-neutral descriptors like “developmentally delayed” or “intellectually disabled” have been intentionally made so dry and clunky to avoid making them appealing insults. (The flip side of that is that lay people are going to be pretty resistant to using them clinically, and I would guess that outside of communities like this one, medical settings and the disabled community, the word “retarded” is still used more often that the currently accepted alternatives, even by those not aiming to offend.) But removing a stigma from stupidity, which is viewed, fairly or not (?), as closely correlated with cognitive capacity, is not a simple thing, and changing the language isn’t going to have any effect on it. I’m not sure why we should expect a tendency toward poor reasoning to escape stigma any more than being “blind” or “lame,” both words that are used metaphorically and imply the named disabilities are negatives, in a way that doesn’t really seem to upset people (although I have heard “lame” criticized - not in a while, though.) Like, poor reasoning is currently causing (and always has caused) gigantic problems in the world, and I think a lot of things about society would have to change before we, as a society, mentally decouple reasoning and cognition, if such a thing is possible. Is that a wise thing to do? I’m not sure. I do know that I have often seen people use high cognitive capacity to reason themselves into what is clearly a “stupid” position, so at least at that end of the spectrum, the correlation is imperfect at best.
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Oct 30, 2023 20:17
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Bar Ran Dun posted:You are defending the idea that you can call people who’s decisions you disagree with, stupid. I was using "cognitive capacity" to mean, roughly, the poo poo that "IQ" measures, and the thing that is considered "intelligence" in the collective public interpretation. The "Big Bang Theory" guys. The standard, dramatically oversimplified view of the human mind and what it is capable of. By "reasoning," I meant reaching good conclusions, and using your brain to make the world better for yourself and those around you. We are absolutely on the same page - to make "IQ" the only axis on which one is "smart" or "stupid" is ridiculous. The idea of using "retard," or other terms that refer to a disability involving low IQ, as a pejorative, is that it's the truth. In retrospect, I may have used "reasoning" and "cognitive capacity" backwards? Like I said, this is way, way up deep in the language - it goes so far beyond the word this thread is about! When I talk about poor reasoning causing problems in the world... I mean, people make poor decisions, and they lead to suffering. In our culture those poor decisions are linked to the idea of "stupidity," commonly thought to be 'The Opposite of the "Big Bang Theory" Guys'. But plenty of bad decisions are made by "whip-smart" people and plenty of wisdom, or creativity, or moral strength or profundity can be found in people who think more slowly. I don't hate myself, so I didn't watch that show, but I'm pretty sure a lot of it was about those guys making bad decisions. Even fuckin' Chuck Lorre gets it, on some level. So getting people to understand different kinds of intelligence, and the unique virtues that somebody like a Downs person can have, is really the key to keeping clinical terms for the disabled from eventually becoming insults hurled at those who we perceive to be making poor decisions, or reaching poor conclusions. And yes, if I am being honest, I myself hold this bias as much as anybody. That I can acknowledge the huge flaws in that point of view is, sadly, not enough to outweigh my deeply embedded intuition that "stupidity" is a singular quality that leads to poor decisions, and often the result of a non-standard brain. That's something that I am working on, but most people don't even know that it's a problem at all. Some words are just too far gone - "idiot," at this point, does just mean "guy who votes for the other guy" or "guy who drives too slow in traffic." And so "retard" was another word that followed in that path, and maybe it's good that we decided to break the cycle with this one, rather than letting it slowly seep into the lexicon as yet another subtle linguistic reminder that the disabled are lesser. Misunderstood fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Nov 1, 2023 |
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Nov 1, 2023 02:04
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Jesus III posted:It will just become a standard insult, just like dumb. I don't think anyone uses it to refer to mute people.
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Nov 3, 2023 16:42
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