Igot into my one and only physical fight when I was in seventh grade. It was right after school let out, the other boy was called Nathan, and moments before I launched at him, he knocked the books out of my brother Casey’s hands and called him “retarded”. More than 20 years after that scuffle, I still wonder how often Casey, a now 35-year-old autistic man, is called that word. Given the current political landscape, I’m certain he’s going to start hearing it more often.
The R-word is in a new era of prominence in rightwing, chronically online circles – especially on 4chan and X. A favorite of those who currently hold power or stand to gain power under Donald Trump’s second administration, the slur is being used with gleeful relish to belittle and mock ideological enemies.
In the past year, Elon Musk has used the R-word at least 16 times on X. He thought Ben Stiller was one for endorsing Kamala Harris; so was the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz for comparing Tesla to Enron.
Elsewhere, brash, right-leaning personalities such as the political commentator Dave Rubin, and Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan of the podcast Red Scare, frequently throw the word around with provocative irreverence, attempting to discredit those who don’t align with their politics.
And people using the word retard is to bring back eugenics and all that. Hateful.
Except this is to entirely miss how language works. We shaved monekys see something then use a word to describe it. If we get told off for using that word – that’s naughty, hateful etc – then we still see that same thing and will use some other word to describe it.
Therefore the progression through idiot, cretin, moron, retard and short busser. Because the thing exists – differently mentally abled – and therefore a word will be used to describe it. And, as these things work, that word used will become an insult.
Shrug.
Given how “Joey” became the replacement dontusethatword, I can see “Casey” replacing it.
If we get told off for using that word – that’s naughty, hateful etc – then we still see that same thing and will use some other word to describe it.
It’s more complex than that. Leftists hold – with some empirical justification – that a language’s structures influence a speaker’s perceptions of colour, time, space, social relations etc without strictly limiting or obstructing them. So they introduce terms and phrases – ‘diversity is our strength’, ‘islamophobia’ – which colour the perceptions of the unreflective. It’s how propaganda works.
Calling Falkland Islanders Bennies then Stills is still a classic of the genre.
I got into my one and only physical fight when I was in seventh grade.
What a puff. (Can I still say that?)
“frequently throw the word around with provocative irreverence”.
First time anyone’s told me being a retard should be revered…
The guardian acts as shrine to the Holy Retard until such a time as, say, an autistic girl might ask a she-copper if she is a lesbian like her nan.
Rightwing, he says. 5 years in prison for him.
TMB
Fortunately the internet neither forgives nor forgets which is why “Lesbian Nana” has become a meme that will never go away.
Returning to spud, using the words “Ben Stiller” and “Retard” unironically in the same sentence shows how divorced from modern day culture the man is.
By comparison Musk knew exactly what he was saying.
Tim – And people using the word retard is to bring back eugenics and all that
Just last week, they were claiming the Holocaust was caused by free speech.
Except this is to entirely miss how language works. We shaved monekys
I’ve never shaved a monkey, which is why I’m not a philologist.
Anyway, the “R word” (lol):
In the past year, Elon Musk has used the R-word at least 16 times on X.
Impressive. Let’s see Paul Allen’s card.
He thought Ben Stiller was one for endorsing Kamala Harris; so was the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz for comparing Tesla to Enron.
Well that’s gay.
When Trump won in November, a “top banker” told Financial Times: “I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.” (Interestingly, this banker chose to remain anonymous.)
Well duh, it’s because retarded pussies would complain.
I’ve spent my life on the lookout for this word: how it shrinks people with intellectual disabilities down to a caricature, incorrectly depicting them as incapable of coherence and, ironically enough, social decorum; how it communicates a lack of respect for their humanity. It’s just something that you do when you have an autistic brother
Elon Musk is also a Rain Man you spastic.
And while the slur was certainly more prevalent when we were teenagers in the early 2000s, this resurgence is still menacing, not least because I can’t fight Musk after class.
Also because he’d batter you.
We’ve seen this before. Starting in 1910, the term “mental retardation” was used to diagnose those who were “feeble-minded”, failed to develop on the average timeline, and were deemed by some doctors as “incurable”. Around the same time, the belief that undesirable traits – specifically intellectual disabilities, and eventually race and sexual orientation – could be “bred out” of existence was growing in popularity in the US. This eugenics movement was endorsed by political powerhouses and substantial research on eugenics was bankrolled by the likes of the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Today, the Guardian is pretending it doesn’t support abortion.
“[The use of the R-word] is absolutely historically linked to the understanding that ‘retarded’ children are defective children and that we can eliminate defective children for the good of society,” said Topher Endress, a reverend in Missouri who holds a doctorate in philosophy from Vanderbilt University.
Well butter my arse and call me Mabel, I haven’t seen Trump voters compared to Nazi Germany in at least five minutes.
Musk, a man who launched a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration festivities, has aligned himself dangerously closely with eugenicist thinking. Musk, who has said he is on the autism spectrum himself, also wields oligarchic power as he attempts to eliminate “unnecessary spending” in the federal government with Trump’s blessing.
First, they came for transgender tapdance in Belize
According to Endress, people who use the slur “understand at a deep level that there is a bottom rung to our social hierarchy, and that is intellectually disabled people. And so because the word ‘retarded’ still links to them and pretty much to them alone, it becomes the worst insult you could give somebody,” Endress says.
N
“the belief that undesirable traits… could be “bred out” of existence.”
They can. Horticultural and livestock industries based on it are the proof. The question is of whether humans should do this to themselves. The answer is they already do through simple natural selection: alphas mate with alphas and bring up their children in alpha circumstances.
The other question is of whether gubmint should do it to us. For all the reasons Hayek and Sowell give us about the impossibility of central control having sufficient information, the answer is no.
Stephen Pinker coined the term Euphemism Treadmill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy_a2C7VSWg
Norman – “the belief that undesirable traits… could be “bred out” of existence.”
They can. Horticultural and livestock industries based on it are the proof. The question is of whether humans should do this to themselves.
Well, how many young people with Down Syndrome do you see these days? They’ve been quietly holocausted, and few people seem to care.
There’s no way I’m clicking a grauniad link to check, but does the article mention that Adolf got his eugenics policies directly from the evil Fabian Society?
This is indeed the way it was, though morons, imbeciles and idiots were concurrent measurements. This “snip” describes it nicely:
Specifically, those who have an IQ between 0 and 25 are idiots; IQs between 26 and 50 are considered imbeciles; and those who have an IQ between 51 and 70 are considered morons.
These terms were popular in psychology as associated with intelligence on an IQ test until around the 1960s. They were then replaced with the terms mild retardation, moderate retardation, severe retardation, and profound retardation.
I consider referring to some people as morons, to be quite complimentary.
I dislike “retard” when it’s used in Britain – thoughtless and pointless adoption of American English irritates me. (See, for example, all those morons who use “moot” in the American sense, being too ill-educated to know the British sense.) By contrast I’m all for adopting American expressions for things where we don’t have an expression of our own – “commuter” used to be quoted as an example – or where the American expression is unbeatably terse or vivid. Or even when the spelling is useful – the way, for example, we used to distinguish a “program” from a “programme”.
The general trend in American English is away from terse and vivid so maybe we should encourage every reaction against that.
Anyway, when I was a lad our own expression was “mental defective” which is less euphemistic than the American “retard” since it carries not the slightest implication that the poor soul is trailing behind a bit and may catch up later.
I’ll grant that “mental defective” is a bit long, at five syllables, so I’d settle for “cretin” which conveniently doesn’t appear on Andy’s list. Moreover it doesn’t encourage mispronunciation of the perfectly decent English verb “retard”.
Another advantage of cretin is that it could be used to tease Steve since its origin is capable of at least two interpretations.
I still chuckle at the football supporter at a match I attended as a boy who described Rangers and Celtic supporters as troglodytes.
“Numpty” is the word I use to describe someone who has done something incredibly stupid. It’s not sexist, racist, ableist, or any other “ist”, and certainly not “phobic”. No idea where it came from, or who first coined it, but it sounds better than the “dipstick” I used before.
“No idea where it [numpty] came from”: when I was young it was used only by Glaswegians. So there’s your probable source.
“Troglodytes” was probably too demanding for them.
DM – Another advantage of cretin is that it could be used to tease Steve since its origin is capable of at least two interpretations.
God loves fools, I am happy to confirm.
Penseivat – It’s not sexist, racist, ableist, or any other “ist”, and certainly not “phobic”
Where’s the fun in that?
dearieme: I first heard of “numpty” in Michael Munro’s 1988 dictionary of Glasgow dialect, “The Patter” (“An idiot: ‘See you? Ye’re a grade-wan numpty, flyin’ colours, nae resits!’”). And I grew up there. Notably, it doesn’t appear in Albert Mackie’s “Glasgow Glossary”, published four years earlier.
To be fair, Mackie’s book is played more for laughs, making fun of the accent with phonetic spellings of – more or less- standard English (not unlike Stanley Baxter’s “Parliamo Glasgow” sketches in the ’60s) as much as documenting genuine dialect words, but it does include a lot of those and I think if he’d been aware of it, he’d have put it in. It’s too good not to, as its spread across the country has shown.
So it was obviously in fairly niche usage even here back then. I suspect Munro actually popularized it in the city itself with his book.
Back in my schooldays, people who were not naturally good at “games” – for example, yours truly – were universally known as “spastics”. Cruel, but there you are. We survived.
Andrew Neil is rather fond of the word ‘Numpty’. Whether he popularised it himself, or just latched on to a trend, I can’t say, but he’s a proud Glaswegian (well, Paisley at least).
Thanks, Sam. I’m mildly surprised that it could be as late as 1988 but I can’t vouch for it being older, my memory being rather patchy. (Though when my wife saw an obituary in the Telegraph the other day and asked “Did you know Sandy Duncan?” I could tell her a useful amount about him ca 1964 or ’65. Which may well have been the last time I met him. Not bad, eh?)
@Peter: if I may again play the “when I was young” card, our expression was ‘spastic hoof’.
God knows why.
We had a lovely verb for someone producing a cock-up e.g. dropping a catch at cricket: “he maffled it.” This was also useful given that HMG had a ministry called MAFF. Was “maffled” used elsewhere in Scotland?
In fairness, I was only 17 in ’88, so my basic frame of reference was the playground, not the workplace or the pub. These things always depend on the circles you move in. But you’d think such an inoffensive insult would have made it to the kids fairly quickly.
Tune into Talksport’s breakfast show to hear Alan Brazil* use the word numpty several times ‘tween the hours of 6:00am to 10:00am. If he turns up.
Not sure I’ve heard one Alastair McCoist** use it.
* A Scottish ex-player of association football.
** See * above.
“Was “maffled” used elsewhere in Scotland?“
I’ve never heard it before, but some colloquialisms are very localised. Example, the well known (in Ayrshire) word “stoor” (sp?) meaning dust or haze; I was surprised to find that colleagues from Govan had no idea what it meant.
dearieme: there’s certainly a role for “retard” in the correct context. My neighbour owns a lab-retard which barks pointlessly and ceaselessly. This is in contradistinction to my own labrador who is charming, well behaved and, above all, silent.
There are examples of Parliamo Glasgow on youtube. It’s brilliant.
@Peter: stoor/stour was used in Annandale when I was a boy: maybe it stretched through Nithsdale and on up to Ayrshire? The views of a Doonhamer might be useful at this point.
Or maybe it was introduced by Ayrshire farming families who, my father told me, had migrated to Dumfriesshire between the wars.
“Stoor” is one of those words that used to be more widespread than it is now, I think. Stoorie Brae is a place frequented by the Broons and Oor Wullie. At the time of their greatest popularity in the middle of the last century, it must have been assumed that everyone would understand the reference. And, of course, DC Thompson’s a long way from Ayrshire. Although it certainly wasn’t in common usage in Glasgow in my memory, I don’t recall anyone not knowing what it meant when if it came up.
@Sam: when I went to work in North Yorkshire in the seventies I was amused to find that there were people that far south who took The Sunday Post. I knew it sold some copies in Newcastle, but Teeside? Goodness me.
Peter, Stoor / stour is used on the east coast from Dundee to Aberdeen and possibly on round the coast as well – dunno
It may be the case that it wasn’t common usage in Weegieland because they are different.
( Too high a % of Oirosh?)
Norman You still have not explained to us why you are an alpha male?.
Do you fight in the army?
The answer is simple – Nope.
The reality is you are an Internet ne*d who has some creepy views on another post about a very serious crime.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Billy Connelly had popularised the word numpty.
Stoor – I see the same things in the way Scottish people speak as per down south.
In Oxon, for example, the native rhotic accent is mainly spoken by older people. Younger people have more of an Estuary accent even if they were born in the Cotswolds. Young Glasgwegians don’t sound like Taggart.
It’s a flattening out of regional differences and many vernacular or Scots words are falling into desuetude, if my memory of reading Oor Wullie annuals serves. Technology is the culprit, natch.
‘he knocked the books out of my brother Casey’s hands and called him “retarded”’
The rules for defamation are somewhat relaxed in the 7th grade.