Help Us End the R-Word

[Alex]

I'm fine with it, but it is a game of moving goalposts.

If no person is ever called retarded but rather autistic it is just natural (without saying it is good or bad) that in a certain amount of time whatever new term is used will become bad. I can see in 20 years one friend saying to another who just locked his keys in the car "man, you're so autistic sometimes."

Similarly, the terms of African Americans did the same thing over the years. Working in the serials collection at the Universal of Washington it was interesting to see long running academic journals focused on blacks in America change their name every couple decades as the currently acceptable term for blacks became tainted as derogatory.

In the case of retarded, I think a more likely course to success is to not try and get rid of the word altogether but rather to give it up and let it be a word meaning "boneheaded" or "stupid" and do our best to just make sure it no longer actually has a clinical or real person definition. Kind of like has happened with moron and idiot. We still have the general non-clinical meaning but no actual morons or idiots are offended because there is nobody that actually falls under the label any more.