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Comment by mlyle | Hacker News Reader

> it's not a consensus opinion.

It's been favored in pretty much every style guide for decades at this point. I am presently in the middle of the political spectrum, but I've spent the majority of my life pretty right-leaning. At the same time, I see no reason to choose words that might imply to a lot of people that I'm only talking about men, or to choose other words that might cause people offense.

It's funny how we can so clearly see this in so many domains -- referring to an unintelligent person as a "moron" would pretty clearly be not nice -- but are willing to defend doing it to other disfavored groups so strongly.

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>referring to an unintelligent person as a "moron" would pretty clearly be not nice

- but neither would it be an attempt to demean everyone who suffers from a learning disability. It would, instead, be an affirmation that low intelligence is an undesirable quality. And anyway, in practice, overwhelmingly such language is aimed at people of ordinary or even above average intelligence, with the intent of suggesting that the target is not meeting expectations.

> but neither would it be an attempt to demean everyone who suffers from a learning disability

No, but it might have that net effect, to whomever is in earshot.

> And anyway, in practice, overwhelmingly such language is aimed at people of ordinary or even above average intelligence

If you don't think the kid who is struggling in school is being called a "retard," I don't know what to tell you.

Another example-- the word "boy." There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the word "boy," but it was used by a lot of people to demean black men. I certainly wouldn't want to say it to a person who would think I'm doing the same thing to that point. And at that point, maybe it's time to prune the word "boy" as a word of address out of my language, and discourage my kids from the "booooiiiiii" that would be interpreted very poorly in the wrong situation.

>If you don't think the kid who is struggling in school is being called a "retard," I don't know what to tell you.

You could start by giving me a reason to believe it.

https://meridian.allenpress.com/idd/article-abstract/48/2/12...

36% of youth in 2009 reported having heard the word "retard" directed towards someone with an intellectual disability.

My wife's brother had a birth injury and endured it pretty constantly throughout his school years.

When I was in 6th grade, almost everybody got called a retard.

That's pretty different from calling the kid with the obvious intellectual disability by the term every day as he waits to board the bus home.

And given that there's people with that experience, perhaps it's time to heavily discourage use of the word in general. Calling your buddy it to be funny helps normalize it for the people who want to use it to be cruel, and gives them cover.

>perhaps it's time to heavily discourage use of the word in general.

Haven't we been doing that in the US since 1990?

OK, so if we accept that something that is a neutral term can turn offensive (retarded) and that we should stop using it as a result... why not do it for other terms that have the same problem?

Because your wife' brother's experience shows that tabooing a word doesn't prevent bullies from using the word. Or was his experience before 1990?

Right around 1990, and I don't think the "really, don't say 'retard'" thing took strong effect until early 2000's.

Our culture's imperfect, but there's a fair bit of evidence that it's a kinder, more courteous world-- especially for youth-- than 30 years ago. Taking some sharp edges off language may have helped with that.

That is of course awful in every way, but I really wonder, isn't the real problem that there are bad people? I think we can agree that people who are heartless enough to bully a vulnerable person like that, they will not stop just because a new euphemism is promoted. So how does it actually help? I can understand that if you are being called a slur, you want that slur to go away, but if it's going to be replaced by another slur, what is actually achieved?

It won't stop people from bullying the vulnerable person, but it will mean that the bullied person won't have to hear the same term in a bunch of contexts, and it will mean the bully will have less plausible deniability if confronted by authority over their behavior.

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