I want to take back ‘Retard’. Because I want it to apply to things that are infuriatingly stupid, instead of it being used as a derogatory term towards special needs people.
I want to take back ‘Retard’. Because I want it to apply to things that are infuriatingly stupid, instead of it being used as a derogatory term towards special needs people.
Why not just call those things infuriating, bad, counterproductive, ruinous, negligent, futile, aggravating, or shitty?
“Retarded” originated as a medical euphemism for what is now sometimes called “developmental delay”: some kid didn’t learn to walk or talk or read or behave himself by the usual age. As a verb, “to retard” is “to slow down”; it’s cognate to “tardy” meaning “late for class”.
The original sense of “retarded” was about people with disabilities.
It was only used as a slang insult among schoolchildren because their teachers were using it as a medically descriptive term: “Be patient with Kevin; he’s retarded.”
The point of calling your friend Billy “a retard” as an insult was that you were comparing him to Kevin. The point of calling the school rules “retarded” was that you were comparing them to Kevin.
The whole reason that you think “retarded” can mean “infuriatingly stupid” is that Kevin flails and babbles because of his disability, and you’re used to being infuriated by him instead of being patient with him like the teacher told you to.
You getting to use “retard” to mean something other than a disability insult is not “reclaiming” a slur. That’s not what “reclaiming” means.
Reclaiming a slur is when the gay activist group calls itself Queer Nation, not when a straight person decides they want to say “queer” as a generic insult. It’s when they say “Sure, you go ahead and call me ‘queer’ — because I’m going to use that as a good thing.”
Reclaiming a slur is when we stopped saying “No, we’re not nerds, stop calling us nerds, you mean jocks!” and started saying “Yes, we are nerds, nerd culture is awesome, you wish you were us.”
You made me look up the etymology and NGL I always thought it must be from “en retard”, late, for some reason. Like because if you’re late you’re delayed and “retarded people” have developmental delays or something. The real etymology kind of makes more sense though.
You’re not wrong either, it does ultimately derive from Latin ‘tardus’ meaning ‘late’, it just took a slight detour in French.
I think the thing about the word “retard” is that it’s not so much about something being aggravating as it is about something being absolutely stupid. It has these hard consonants that make it sound powerful when it’s said. It’s effective, and it’s really uncomfortable to hear. It’s the fuck of the moron/idiot family of words.
And we’ve got this reality where there’s variability in how smart people are. And then people with developmental delays get tossed into the extreme end of the scale with medical terminology, and so that gives people an easy word to use when someone is acting on the extreme end of “not smart”. And then the word becomes a slur, and then a new word gets coined that’s medical and not a slur, and then it gets co-opted as a slur, and so on.
And it’s not gonna stop, because sometimes you do gotta call out someone for making stupid decisions, especially when their idiocy is causing harm. It’s just we’ve also got assholes around, but those people will insult more than just someone’s brain, they’ll go for anything that hurts.