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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.
A concrete advantage of not using "retarded" at all is that it is a very, very broad word to use when referring to the mentally handicapped, which is also an unproductively broad term when the reality is that "retarded" people will have various forms of Down's, autism, etc. Rather than paint with an extremely broad brush, the current permitted usage of "exceptional" (which also frequently encompasses gifted students or anyone whose parents scams them into special privileges) is so obviously useless that it forces any real discussion to focus on the specifics of how an individual student's exceptionalism/handicap presents.
From an etymological perspective, "retarded" is very similar to "ritartando", which anyone who took a year of band recognizes as basically being Latin for "slow". In almost all cases, it is not accurate to describe a mentally handicapped student's learning as merely slower than other students'. While this is perhaps blunt, it is almost, in a sense, more fair, in that seeing a handicapped student as slow means that they are not fulfilling their potential, which in turn subtly puts more blame on them.
I don't really have a strong argument against the use of "retarded" to describe generally idiocy or to use it as a new slur to replace "gay" ("lame" is not nearly taboo enough to work), but there is a reasonably strong argument to dissociate it from the mentally handicapped. Most of the taboo status of "retarded" generally is probably just the education field's reasonably justified move away from it naturally spreading.
I just want to say, I found your usage of the phrase "mentally handicapped" in context of discussing the offensiveness of "retarded" to describe such people to be funny, because it was about 10 years ago that multiple mental healthcare workers informed me that "handicapped" was now even more offensive than "retarded," because it was a reference to village idiots who would have a cap in their hand to beg for handouts (no idea if there's etymological veracity to this - I'd guess not). The euphemism treadmill is hard enough to stay on top of, but it appears it's not even linear!
I don't claim to be on the euphemism treadmill, which is also to say that my inside views of education and special ed are secondhand. I figured that "handicapped" was probably offensive too (and would have the same sort of exceasibe broadness problem as "retarded") but I decided that I needed some reasonably concise way to refer people whose brains have not developed in a way that provides full functionality.
They told me that "developmentally disabled" was the proper term, and I'd guess that "disabled" might enter the treadmill at some point in another 3 decades. Maybe when describing an engine that has been made to no longer function, the non-offensive term will be something like "unworking" like how zoomers are using "unalived" for suicide now.
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