I hate it when Cretins and Mongoloids violate my terms!

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."
I'm 100% in favor of free speech, even when the speech in question is not within the rubric of my day-to-day vocabulary. I often get spontaneous, though, and I never stopped to think about whether I have referred to anyone as a "retard" recently. Grammatically, it's an odd noun, and a common term of derision when I was growing up, especially in school. Typically, the word would be invoked when someone would get exasperated over someone else's inability to understand a seemingly simple point -- and if my memory serves me correctly, the term was more likely to be used on the athletic field than in the classroom.

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.
That may represent a trend in language. Elitist professionals invent terms ("moron" is derived from Greek word moros, meaning "dull"), and if they fall into popular use, they cease to be the language of the elite, and therefore new terms have to be invented. However, people being the way they are, I suspect that finding clever ways to call people stupid will always be a popular pastime. And thus professional terms -- no matter how seemingly neutral or politically correct -- will tend to drift away from their origin as they become hijacked by ordinary people and used as terms of opprobrium. The meaning of words evolves according to the mechanism:
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.
And, of course, "slow," "mentally handicapped," "mentally challenged," "feeble-minded," or even "intellectual disabled"can all be used to indicate disapproval or disagreement with the mental processes of other people.

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.
So said one of Communism's founding bigots, Friedrich Engels.

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.
I don't know why they left out the Ramones, but I thought they made an important contribution to the word's evolution -- along with a nod to the important historical principle that all good Cretins will in fact go to heaven!

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.

posted by Eric on 10.02.09 at 10:36 AM





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Comments

Devo's immortal Mongoloid isn't anti-mongoloid or insulting

and he had a job...
and he brought home the bacon...
...nobody even cared

Just like any other guy getting along.

SteveBrooklineMA   ·  October 2, 2009 04:09 PM

What an educational post!

I always thought "cretin" was derived from the fact that someone, somewhere, had a really low opinion of people from the Island of Crete.

Could now please psychoanalytically deconstruct the Ramones' "Pinhead"?

Rhodium Heart   ·  October 3, 2009 12:56 AM

I recall reading back in the sixties about the terms "cretin," "moron" and "imbecile," which applied to specific regions of IQ. I don't even remember the hierarchy, not that they have any real currency in psychology today. But your point about jargon brings to mind "psychopath," later relabeled "sociopath," and finally named "associative personality disorder" (unless they thought up another phrase the rest of us haven't yet adopted). Same condition, except that as each term entered the public domain the psychological community frantically created a new term to describe it.

Because Lord knows, psychology is full of enough BS that the last thing its practitioners want is that the plebs figure out how empty it is. I'm surprised you haven't mentioned how recently they classified homosexuality as a mental disorder.

Me, I live for the day when we all adopt the term "shrink" as a pejorative. I suspect it will be after we decide to strangle all lawyers at birth.

Steve Skubinna   ·  October 3, 2009 02:06 AM

I thought "shrink" already was a pejorative!

Donna B.   ·  October 3, 2009 06:26 PM

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