i find it funny how people here love to use the word retard.

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I don't really see anyone using the word 'retard' or 'retarded' in an offensive way around here.

I find it, a little ironic, myself. I associate that word, with bad Elementary and High School memories. I was called that label by my peers, quite a bit. I was also asked, if I was smart in various regular classes, by various kids, who lived in my old neighbourhood. I know what that question really meant. Do you get good grades, in this class, or are you the R-Word? I'm amazed, that some people here aren't bothered by that word. I hope that the excessive use, of the R-Word will not be the wave, of the future.

This is so true!! !! !! !

I don't like it how people use the word as an insult. They basically took a word and made it into something nasty. "Retard" was just a diagostic label, now it's unfortunately used as an insult more often.

Yes I use it. People need to suck it up retard means slow and on my scale slow is pretty common.

Slow in what sense?

'Retard', as a word, just means 'slow'. People took the word and made it mean 'mentally retarded', then other people took it and made it 'offensive'.

I never use that word. I prefer mentally challenged. It's just... not as bad to say. And I don't like it as slang either.

on your scale?

I'm not sure what the medical term is for it but I definitely go out of my way to not use the word "retard" for anything. Can't tell you how many times that word has been used on me.

"Retard" IS the medical term.

Or it atleast it WAS.

Back in the 20 and 30's the solemn members of the medical and scientific establishment began to classify the intellectually impaired (and grade them by levels)- and they used (as actual medical terms) labels like "moron" and "imbecile".

In post war American the scientists decided they should stop using terms that are epithets as medical labels. So they pulled out a fancy French word for "delayed" as the new euphemism for the folks they had been labeling "imbecils" and "morons". That word of course was "retarded".

Retard became the standard medical term in the Fifties.

However by the late Fifties and Sixties the term had leaked out of the halls of medicine and was on the lips of every grade school on the playgrounds of America. I, and all my boomer generation cohorts (and all of the waves of kids since) have both hurled, and recieved, the R epithet growing up.

But like you, and like most aspie kids, I was the target more often than the hurler of it.

So by the Seventies the establishment decided they needed a euphemism for the word that was itself originally a euphemism. So then it became taboo to say "retard", and you had start saying "mentally challenged".

Call it sad, or call it funny, but the world seems to need to keep finding euphemisms for...euphemisms!

I admit I use it sometimes for when I wrote my stories online and had the characters using it and one of the characters picking it up in school from her friends and peers and starts using it herself saying it's a figure of speech. That is what I was told in high school too and I was always hearing that word when I was I high school.Plus I was called it growing up so my character is called it in my story.

Retard just means delay or hold back in terms of progress, development, or accomplishment. So that definition implies it only means humans, not on objects.

Retarded just means less advanced in mental, physical, or social development than is usual for one's age. Then there is the new definition of the word and it said very foolish or stupid.

Source: Google.

But people don't use these words right anymore and it's become a slang and now it has turned into a bad word like the N word has.

"Retarded" is a more accurate descriptor then the current "intellectually disabled".

"Retarded" was almost exclusively used as an insult and taunt when referring to other students in the schools I was in during the 1960's and 1970's. "Retard" is a more recent as a common expression. I have never heard or seen used it used in any other way then as an insult.

Retard(pejorative) - Wikipedia

Even though I grew up going to school in the 90s and 00s, I am surprised the slang "retard" (or any slang derivative) was even used far back as the 50s and 60s. Always thought it was a more 90s or 00s thing. The word had a very long run.