I want to take back ‘Retard’. Because I want it to apply to things that are infuriatingly stupid, instead of it being used as a derogatory term towards special needs people.
Why not just call those things infuriating, bad, counterproductive, ruinous, negligent, futile, aggravating, or shitty?
“Retarded” originated as a medical euphemism for what is now sometimes called “developmental delay”: some kid didn’t learn to walk or talk or read or behave himself by the usual age. As a verb, “to retard” is “to slow down”; it’s cognate to “tardy” meaning “late for class”.
The original sense of “retarded” was about people with disabilities.
It was only used as a slang insult among schoolchildren because their teachers were using it as a medically descriptive term: “Be patient with Kevin; he’s retarded.”
The point of calling your friend Billy “a retard” as an insult was that you were comparing him to Kevin. The point of calling the school rules “retarded” was that you were comparing them to Kevin.
The whole reason that you think “retarded” can mean “infuriatingly stupid” is that Kevin flails and babbles because of his disability, and you’re used to being infuriated by him instead of being patient with him like the teacher told you to.
You getting to use “retard” to mean something other than a disability insult is not “reclaiming” a slur. That’s not what “reclaiming” means.
Reclaiming a slur is when the gay activist group calls itself Queer Nation, not when a straight person decides they want to say “queer” as a generic insult. It’s when they say “Sure, you go ahead and call me ‘queer’ — because I’m going to use that as a good thing.”
Reclaiming a slur is when we stopped saying “No, we’re not nerds, stop calling us nerds, you mean jocks!” and started saying “Yes, we are nerds, nerd culture is awesome, you wish you were us.”
You made me look up the etymology and NGL I always thought it must be from “en retard”, late, for some reason. Like because if you’re late you’re delayed and “retarded people” have developmental delays or something. The real etymology kind of makes more sense though.
You’re not wrong either, it does ultimately derive from Latin ‘tardus’ meaning ‘late’, it just took a slight detour in French.
I think the thing about the word “retard” is that it’s not so much about something being aggravating as it is about something being absolutely stupid. It has these hard consonants that make it sound powerful when it’s said. It’s effective, and it’s really uncomfortable to hear. It’s the fuck of the moron/idiot family of words.
And we’ve got this reality where there’s variability in how smart people are. And then people with developmental delays get tossed into the extreme end of the scale with medical terminology, and so that gives people an easy word to use when someone is acting on the extreme end of “not smart”. And then the word becomes a slur, and then a new word gets coined that’s medical and not a slur, and then it gets co-opted as a slur, and so on.
And it’s not gonna stop, because sometimes you do gotta call out someone for making stupid decisions, especially when their idiocy is causing harm. It’s just we’ve also got assholes around, but those people will insult more than just someone’s brain, they’ll go for anything that hurts.
Inflammable should probably be reclaimed for public safety reasons.Everything is flamable if you heat it up enough.
But it puts things in flames
I would like triggered and ptsd back please. Both words have lost their meaning and as a person suffering from cptsd it’s infuriating.
The same with OCD and depression. I honestly get the urge to kick people using phrases like “I am totally OCD about [something trivial and irrelevant]” or being “depressed” because it happens to be raining outside or some other banality. And don’t get me started on “funny” merchandise like T-shirts with respective slogans printed on them, as if suffering from a mental illness was a fashion statement.
Be careful. The word only took on its perjorative meaning because of the connection to various groups of special needs people. Before then, the noun form was pretty much nonexistent, and the adjective and verb forms were boring latinate terms meaning “slow(ed) down.”
Not enough people consider the origin of these words, trying to use them divorced from the thing that actually makes it a pejorative. Growing up, “gay” was another one people tried to use as an insult “non-homophobically”
It’s poisonous for a reason
I bake bread. My loaves are often retarded.
“conservative”
Today people who self-identify as conservative are basically all assholes with a deep hatret towards dignity, humanity, society and nature. They’re proud to be assholes, they’re vice-signalling.
But the actual word - “conservative” - it has lost all meaning. What are they “conserving”? They’re against environmentalism. I’d like to “conserve” nature so that future generations may still live on it. Am I now conservative? They want to burn everything down even the things they claim to uphold. They yell about freedom of speech and ban books at the same time. They shit on rules and all long-standing conventions, norms and just basic human tactfulness. What things are they “conserving”? The word has lost all meaning and means just bigoted loud asshole today.
Conservatives “conserve” social hierarchy.
yeah I feel like the meaning has stayed pretty accurate
The word “conservative” has always meant the same precise thing: narcissism. It is the personal ideology of whatever is good for the conservative, dressed in a stoic preservation of an ideal that is poorly defined The conservative feigns resistance to change “for chage’s sake” but will instantly abandon any position the very instant that it affects them directly. There are no philosophical positions, no economic policies, no political ideologies that are inherently “conservative.” Rather, the conservative determines what is worthy of being “conserved” and what needs to be changed. There has never been universal agreement about what positions a conservative must adhere to, and the most successful conservative parties rally around the identity of the core leadership.
Trump is not an aberration of conservativism. He is the quintessence of conservativism, the inevitable avatar of pure conservative faith in the idea that being part of the in group is more important than whatever the in group stands for.
But there has never been any point in history where those who identify as “conservative” have been anything else.
Look if you’re not disabled or special needs you really don’t have any right to reclaim this word in any sense. This is the equivalent of trying to reclaim the n word as a white person. It’s just incredibly inappropriate and insensitive. Also, can I just say, your definition of repurposing this word is incredibly problematic because you’re actually still just using it to mean the same thing it was originally intended to mean. And it’s incredibly offensive, just so you know. So please don’t use this word.
And frankly as a person with a cognitive disability, our community really isn’t keen on repurposing the r word in any way so please don’t think you can just jump in and do this without consulting the people it impacts. Even if we had repurposed this word, it’s still offensive for non-disabled people to use it in the same way it’s offensive for white people to use the n word.
Ya I would never be able to reclaim it for myself. For my whole life it was used only as a strong negative.
It’s the same for my wife and queer. It’s a word she can’t use to describe herself without thinking of old mystery books. “Well that’s quite queer”
I don’t use this as an adjective to describe a person, but I generally park my bread dough in the refrigerator to retard it. So my dough is retarded when I chill it.
As a perjorative for a human being though? No, have not used that as an adult, though I don’t think “delayed” is any different, it has the same meaning. But it costs me nothing not to use it, so I don’t.
What I would like to reclaim is the word “literally”. Why the fuck does it now seem to mean literally the opposite of literally.
Nimrod.
Meant a great hunter until Bugs Bunny used it sarcastically.
According to an unreliable source - some 70s comic by the same guy who made the evangelical Chick tracts - Nimrod was an Oedipus-type figure that married his mother. So I always took Bugs use of “Nimrod” as a sly way to say “motherfucker”.
The programming language Nim was originally called Nimrod. The creator had to rename it after he found out that the word has this connotation.
I dunno, the Biblical story around Nimrod doesn’t paint him in a good light either.
I mean yeah it’s not a great light but Nimrod was considered a mighty hunter and a tyrannical ruler, not exactly the fool we think of it today.
Bugs Bunny is too powerful. Not only could his wordplay fool those on his world but he has redefined the meaning of the word Nimrod as well as making people believe carrots are associated with rabbits.
I would like the word “woke” back.
So ridiculous… I never used the term but understood it basically meaning “mindfulness and accepting humanity”.
Then pop politics took it, stuck their chodes in it, fucked it, dragged it through the streets and shot it in the head.
And now its basically a hate term for anyone that lives with respect towards humanity.
But don’t get me wrong, I hated when people threw it around as conveniently as “lit” or some shit like that.
Now using the word woke basically means you’re too dumb to understand life or your own existence, because it’s only grumpy selfish assholes that use it.
Awake (woke) to human needs, human rights, how broken capitalism is and humanity’s effect on the climate.
No, no, the racists stole it from the black people fair and square, and you know they never give anything back to black people without first shitting on it.
I would also like to roll in to work late and say “sorry, I woke up late” without getting accosted by Ron DeSantis but whachagonnado.
Oh wait that probably isn’t what you meant. How long did the word have it’s original meaning? I feel like it was only a couple of years maximum before it got taken and broken.
In mainstream culture, I feel like it had its original meaning from like 2014 until maybe 2021. Before that it was a part of black culture since like the 1930s. At least that’s what a cursory googling got me.
I guess I picked it up pretty late then.
Pineapple. Just use ananas like the rest of the world.
It’s not from a pine tree and it’s not an apple.
Way too close to bananas for my liking.
Yeah, “Can you go to the store to grab anananas?” is going to get me to bring bananas home every time.
What we’ve got isnt too close to apples?
I have the same issue with Kansas and Arkansas.
not sure what “rest of the world” is because there’s so many languages. i know that portuguese calls it “abacaxi” (“xi” is pronounced “she”)
Ah, there’s an old image showing this. I guess it’s not ananas in every language, but it is a lot of them!
Portuguese is even on this list, but modified with (eu). What does that mean?
Probably, like Spanish, that it has a separate language spun off in Latin America that’s “the same language” but only mostly. I think they branch more than, e.g., a southern dialect vs England, but I don’t know enough of the different versions to know if that’s real or not.
EU means Europe (so european portuguese), which has a few more pronounced differences compared to brazilian portuguese compared to the difference between US english and UK english
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“truth” should not mean whatever angry shit you saw on YouTube today.
Gay… I’m old enough to remember when it just meant happy… We even had to change a friend’s nickname when the usage changed … His name is Ben, and we called him Bengay at first (like the muscle rub) which shortened to Gay… We would literally refer to him as Gay and call him that in public with no problem… Then things changed and we couldn’t call him that anymore. I’d like Gay back
Born in the fifties? You must have seen a lot more than that change
1961 and yes, but you don’t want me to list all the changes I’ve seen lol, that would be a few books, I just answered the question about a word change I’d like back, first one that came to mind, and now you are trying to provoke me into a boomer rant
You could do an ama. I remember on Reddit back when AMAs were with ordinary people.
ABA - Ask Boomer Anything
Like what was it like to have no contact with anyone while you drove your car home, and then you get home to check your answering machine to see if anybody tried to contact you
I had a friend in kindergarten, his older brother was named Guy.
Iirc, he was gay.
Lol
Used to mean something else in the world of machinery and auto mechanics. Old school stuff. There is a screw that holds the distributor cap in place. A mechanic would loosen that screw and rotate the whole distributor cap very slightly, maybe 5° or so, the thing is round, so that’s a really small portion of a circle. So one could turn it clockwise or counterclockwise to advance or retard the timing.
And that usage is still fine and actively used in those kinds of industries. But OP is just being edgy.
I have a project car I’m working on, and the distributor timing was so far advanced that the engine would barely run, even when the adjustment was at full retard. I took the distributor out and re-installed it one gear tooth retarded, and now I can set the timing correctly.
I couldn’t have told this story on reddit, my comment would have been removed.
That’s stupid.
Thanks for your input.
Evidence is in Lemmy still needs /s.
Aviation as well - procedures might say to “retard the throttle”
Roguelike.
Elaborate.
You mean for computer games or people?
When I was a communications director, I used the term “retards” as in the following sentence: “This type of legislation retards progress on several key initiatives.”
My boss made me take it out because it might offend people.
Talk about the dumbing down of America…
I was watching a video from Technology Connections, about electric cars and the need to rethink their brake lights. He showed a document from the EU about regulations about car braking. In that document, the words ‘retardation’ and ‘retarding’ were both used, referencing braking. Pretty sure someone from America, if they were to see that, would be assuming ‘retardation’ is like a disease inflicted onto normal people and ‘retarding’ would be the transforming state into being a complete retard.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
“En Retard” is French for late. Also “retard” means delay, in French.
I would like to reclaim the word pariah, erase it’s existence and swap it with pariyah (pronounced purr-E-yeah), the plural form of pari (purr-E), meaning angels.
Pariah comes from the word Paraiyar (drummers). Paraiyar are a lower caste group from Tamil Nadu, a southern state in India, whose job revolved around drumming and witchcraft.
As if weaponization of this word from a caste to a slur wasn’t enough, the colonialist repurposed it, and made it international.
I can’t even imagine being a Paraiyar folks, and having to hear this word everyday.
If it helps, remove the word pariah from your vocabulary.
TIL thanks.
