this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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"Retarded" definitely didn't start out as an insult. There was a time when "mentally retarded" was what people with developmental disabilities were called by the medical establishment. My Boomer mother still uses it without malice (and is scolded by my Gen Z kids) to refer to those with cognitive disabilities because it wasn't an insult when she was a kid. It was fully an insult when my Gen X self was growing up.
I think there may be too much white knighting for a word that no one seriously uses any more. "You can't use that word because in the past it was a designation for the cognitively disabled." But really "retarded" has lost any meaning other than as an insult to mean supremely stupid. It often doesn't even refer to a person but could be an object or a situation.
You've pointed out the whole problem. Only two generations ago the word "retarded" was used without malice to refer to individuals who had a developmental disability. To use it as an insult, now, makes it all the more demeaning to those individuals with developmental disabilities.
It's different from "dumb" or "lame," which I've never heard used as an innocent way to describe a speech or physically impaired person, firsthand. Those words fit your description, better, of those that have been so far removed from their original meaning that they are no longer offensive by today's standards.
Dumb really means not being able to speak; I've never heard a different term for that medical condition.
But then of course it is also absolutely used as synonymous with stupid; the definition conflict is never really apparent because actually being medically dumb is so rare.
Language evolution is very interesting.
"Dumb" is "mute", but neither are used medically anymore. It is "speech impaired"
retarded is "developmentally disabled", it isn't really used medically anymore.
Completely agree, by "other way round" in my comment I meant it didn't originally mean disabled not that it started as an insult