“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’re really more offended by a person taking issue with a word that, for at least the last thirty years, has been used to insult individuals by comparing them to disabled people, as if the latter were somehow less-than? You’re more offended by a person having some level of compassion toward disabled people, than by a person who speaks of them as if they’re without dignity?

Pretty low if you ask me. If keeping the meaning of the insult “retarded” has higher societal importance to you than having respect for disabled people you just might be a huge piece of shit.

Literally all this dude above is asking is for people to not invoke disabled individuals when insulting another person, and people in this thread are bending over backwards to justify doing just that. Pretty fucking gross.

A little bit of both, apparently.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot

If this is correct, then it started out as a word for private citizen and then evolved in Greek to mean ignorant.

Then in the 19th Century was coined as a medical term.

Calling a username disgusting is not the same as calling a person disgusting. I even wrote “nothing personal”.

I fucking love the internet