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Notes -
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.
While I myself will use insults like that, at the end of the day they're pretty much entirely just "I don't like this person's ideas and disagree with them and want to be mean about that" in actual usage. So really in a polite mature conversation we shouldn't use retarded cause we shouldn't be insulting to begin with.
As for when we do want to be mean, which insult you pick is contextual. Dummy is silly and gives a joking vibe. Idiot and stupid are the classic and basic "I disagree with you and want to be mean about it". Retarded is the "I'm really upset about how much we disagree and will violate social norms to express this" one. IRL I would not be dishing out the extreme one too often or else it diminishes the value there. The guy who calls everything retarded has less meaning when they say it vs the guy who barely ever calls anything retarded.
I once debated with a friend who never used "real" profanity/vulgarity. My position at the time was: if you just use "fudge" every time a vulgar person would have used "fuck", you're essentially cursing just as much as they are, you're just using a different but isomorphic language to curse in.
Years later, she was speaking about something upsetting enough to say "fuck", for the first and only time ever in my presence. Her language was not isomorphic to mine after all. Mine has an f-word corresponding to her "fudge", but it does not have any single word that can instantly both convey and provide evidence for "this is the worst thing I've ever spoken about in my life". That's actually kind of a powerful thing to have in your vocabulary.
It's weird that our "violate social norms" words are often so bad at that etymologically, though. I'm old enough that it sounds silly to me that "retarded", a word chosen out of kindness for its clinical sound and gentle literal meaning of "slowed down a little", is now on society's Top Ten No-No Words list. I wonder if "fuck you" sounded even more confusing to old fogies at some point centuries ago. "Yes, I will have sex soon; thank ye for the well-wishes?" I hope to live long enough to someday accidentally tell my grandkids that something "challenged" me and then get dragged into a 10 minute long Get Off My Lawn digression about how I'm not being insensitive toward the physically and mentally challenged ("Ohhh! You said it again, grandpa!") and how back in my day that wasn't even "the C word" yet.
Barbara Tuchman had a good anecdote somewhere in "The Proud Tower" about an older German noblewoman visiting America and being quite charmed. Not quite understanding something lost in translation, she said something like this:
"Oh, you Americans talk just like us Germans! We have our 'verdammt' and you have your 'God damn it'! "
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