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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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What are the steelman arguments for/against using the word "retarded" to describe idiocy?

The main argument I've heard is that actually mentally retarded people are well aware of their condition being used as a punching bag to put down other humans, and this naturally produces feelings of Feels Bad Man. Why would you knowingly inflict such collateral damage on innocents when there are perfectly valid alternative insults to be used?

And yet I can't help but feel that this is what the left would call "tone policing." I wanna express myself how I feel like expressing myself, damn it, and that shit right there is some fucking retarded shit.

Personally I just find it irritating to not be able to use the word literally.

Actually, in the vein of master and slave in hardware, I'm amazed we're still allowed to call things e.g. 'flame-retardant'.

Amusingly I just had a new hire be genuinely surprised to see “master” and “slave” control boards in a wiring diagram. He’s not even a lefty (or political at all afaik), just had genuinely never seen it before, it actually took him a second to realize what the term meant. He sort of awkwardly chuckled like “are we really allowed to call it that?” and then we moved on. Quite funny tbh.

Evidently there’s a new euphemism that everyone learns in engineering school now? I should’ve asked him what it was.

I am legit mad about the push to change perfectly good terms of art just because of the theoretical offense someone might take. It's completely retarded, and those who pushed for such changes should be kicked out of the industry.

The current standard for data signalling purposes is controller/peripheral, leading to PICO/POCI, which somehow manages to be worse than the MISO/MOSI I already hated.

controller/peripheral

Huh. Why do they always pick such long words for the “new” versions of these things? Master/servant still too hierarchical? Dom/sub too sexual?

It’s wild to me how quickly this must’ve changed. I graduated during the tail end of covid, not long ago at all and after the Summer of Floyd, and I can recall some general discussion about standards orgs and curricula potentially moving away from master/slave as a term. My coworker graduated this past summer and had never even heard of master/slave as a term.

Many of the architects we work with have changed from “master suite” to “primary suite” on their drawings, which is a change of the same era, but in actual conversation and even during more formal meetings most will switch between the two casually and pretty much at random (and contractors/builders never say “primary”, although few of them would be confused if you did). I try to call those rooms “primary” in meetings if that’s how they’re labeled, but only in the way I’d always try to stick to the right name for each room in general, there’s certainly no pressure to avoid saying master. I wonder if architecture students are now leaving school having never heard the term “master bedroom.”

Huh. Why do they always pick such long words for the “new” versions of these things? Master/servant still too hierarchical? Dom/sub too sexual?

I prefer pimp/ho

It’s wild to me how quickly this must’ve changed

We literally discussed it in one of the CW threads back on Reddit.