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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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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.