You learn something every day, and I just learned something cool about Facebook:

"The mere use of the word 'retard' is not a violation of terms of use."

Of course, as an adult I've heard it used more times in political reference than I care to remember. Bush retard draws nearly 1.5 million Google hits. Obama retard draws slightly fewer, even though he's the president now. But Bush moron and Obama moron are more popular.

Now that I've been forced to think about it, it just so happens that in my day-to-day fits of pique and exasperation, I'm more likely to call people and things morons and moronic, as opposed to retarded. As to why, I dunno, as I never thunk about it before. Obviously, a moron is a person with a low IQ, and morons are usually considered at least slightly retarded, so there is a degree of overlap.

Wow!

I never knew it before, but even moron is now considered a "controversial term."

Moron is a controversial term once used in psychology to denote a category of mental retardation.[1] The term was closely tied with the American eugenics movement.[2] Once the term became popularized, it fell out of use by the psychological community.

The term "mental retardation" has itself now acquired some pejorative and shameful connotations over the last few decades due to the use of "retarded" as an insult. This may in turn have contributed to its replacement with expressions such as "mentally challenged" or "intellectual disability". While "developmental disability" may be considered to subsume other disorders (see below), "developmental disability" or "developmental delay" (for people under age 18), are generally considered more acceptable terms than "mental retardation" among members of the disability community.

There will never be a shortage of ways to call idiots stupid.

I may be showing my age here, but when I was a kid, an absolute favorite insult was to call someone a "Cretin." That word has fallen into such disfavor that it has withered away as an insult -- almost in direct proportion to the withering away of the underlying disease. Appropriately, its Communist usage has similarly withered away:

'Parliamentary cretinism' is an incurable disease, an ailment whose unfortunate victims are permeated by the lofty conviction that the whole world, its history and its future are directed and determined by a majority of votes of just that very representative institution that has the honour of having them in the capacity of its members.

The word's actual history is fascinating:

Cretin is the oldest and comes from a dialectal French word for Christian.[12] The implication was that people with significant intellectual or developmental disabilities were "still human" (or "still Christian") and deserved to be treated with basic human dignity. This term has not been used in any serious or scientific endeavor since the middle of the 20th century and is now always considered a term of abuse: notably, in the 1964 movie Becket, King Henry II calls his son and heir a "cretin." "Cretinism" is also used as an obsolescent term to refer to the condition of congenital hypothyroidism, in which there is some degree of mental retardation.

No seriously.

Then there's "Mongoloid," musically immortalized by Devo:

But then, if Mongoloid is a racist term because it associates a form of mental retardation with a race or even nationality, wouldn't "Cretin" be a form of anti-Christian bigotry?

The anti-bigot bigots word police better get to work.