One of the most jarring changes in language that has taken place in my lifetime is the transmogrification of the word “retarded” from an accepted commonplace for mental disability to a hate-word that has left the schoolyard in short order. I certainly don’t resent this change viscerally in the way some other language policing feels stifling and imposed — though it is complex for linguistic purposes. For one thing, the verb “to retard” as an antonym for “to advance,” with the double meaning of slowing or repelling, is, in theory, a word that remains in good standing. But because of the stigma applied to the noun for people, it cannot really be heard without noticing it, and it is something you only hear older people say. It seems reasonable to predict that it will simply fall away, and this is regrettable collateral damage, even if the targeted strike is acceptable.
The occasion for these thoughts is a minor scandal in which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer used the word when talking about public housing and then apologized. A Politico write-up of the incident termed it an “outmoded word.” Perhaps an apology was in order. Perhaps not, as the group in question was named the Association for the Help of Retarded Children when then-Assemblyman Schumer helped secure funding for a group home that it was trying to build. It’s now known as just the AHRC.
If it is accurate and legitimate to describe the problem as one of employing merely “outmoded” terminology, it is impossible not to notice a double standard at play and to suspect that the double standard operates on political lines. Some history is in order.
Michael D. Shear, now the White House correspondent for the New York Times, wrote at his former Washington Post perch in 2010 about a similar scandal in which “White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has apologized for referring to liberals as ‘retarded’ during a strategy session last summer.” He also noted: “The Special Olympics has launched a campaign called ‘spread the word to end the word,’ which is aimed at eliminating the use of the word ‘retard’ in reference to people with special needs.”
This tells us something about how recently the word came to be seen as unacceptable and how it happened. The Special Olympics as an organization made a concerted effort to change the social norm in favor of “special needs,” and it succeeded. The Special Olympics is an organization that has long been run by the Kennedy-Shriver clan.
The Kennedys have a family legacy with special needs members that is sordid. Patriarch Joe Kennedy elected to have Rosemary Kennedy lobotomized, and this psychodrama has produced a bad conscience that may be the driving force behind wishing to place terms for mentally disabled people on the euphemism treadmill.
This is how the word changed: politically. And it remains political. When the Reddit group WallStreetBets hit the national news for its GameStop play, newswriters had to decide whether to quote its users’ frequent edgily humorous use of the word “retards” to apply to themselves. They largely balked. When Shear’s New York Times colleague Taylor Lorenz, the internet culture reporter, falsely reported in February that “[Clubhouse investor and prominent tech venture capitalist Marc Andreesen] just used … the r-slur on Clubhouse tonight and not one other person in the room called him on it or saying anything,” she did not call it merely “outmoded.” Perhaps it is time for a bipartisan conversation about just what kind of offense employing this term is.
