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Comment by samt | Hacker News Reader

Yes it is highly offensive to many English speaking individuals in the US. It has historically been used as a highly derogatory term for disabled individuals.

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It's certainly at minimum an insulting word, and in this context unambiguously so.

In the context of, say, aerodynamics, its merely a word of art, e.g. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/aerodynamic+braking

It'll be another word, perhaps in a more ambigious context, next time. Which brings up another point: I just don't want to have to worry about what will become this politically incorrect in the future when I'm writing code and documentation.

It's a perfectly good word that should not be banned:

This patch retards the rate of retry attempts after three consecutive failures

It wouldn't be banned in that context.

That requires people to understand context and nuance.

We live in a world where a guy wants to ban Mel Brooks' The Producers because he doesn't realize it's a satire of Hitler, not an homage. Lots of people don't or won't appreciate context.

And generally people who don't understand context are laughed off the stage and not taken seriously.

Apparently not on github, however.

The context of the original repo was very clearly that of an insulting word.

re: The Producers, with any topic you'll get one or two extremists of any varity. You should judge it not by "did someone want to stop this", but instead by "did someone(s) in power to stop it, want to stop it". One crank protesting outside a cinema is very different from the CEO of a movie studio deciding not to make the film.

The whole argument hangs on that point. I don't know where your optimism comes from. Seeing a lot of human behaviour on the net in this area, I have pretty much zero confidence that the right decision would always be made.

> I just don't want to have to worry about what will become this politically incorrect in the future when I'm writing code and documentation.

Then don't say/write bigotted things. Honestly, it's like asking people not to write spelling or grammar mistakes in documentation. It's not that hard.

tell that to airbus engineers. Perhaps you can boycott flying on every airbus because it says "retard" to the pilots on landing.

Do you not know that words can have more than one meaning? From the context you can tell the meaning. When airbus use "retard" they're using it to mean "to slow down".

It's not "these 6 letters in this combination is banned", it's "stop insulting people based on mental illnesses".

It's not insulting people based on mental illnesses though. The software wasn't for people with mental illnesses.

"Mental retardation" has been a medical term since relatively recently. The "retardation" means nothing more than "being held back". But people did pick it up as a derogatory term, and so it was replaced with "intellectual disability". A classic euphemism treadmill.

In the context of medication, "retard" is still in use: it describes medication that is released steadily and continuously into the bloodstream.

Useful to know, thanks. I was quite surprised by the furore as in the UK it's typically not deemed quite so offensive.

It is fairly offensive in the UK too. But we usually use fucktard instead I guess which confuses the issue.

Not just USA, in a lot of the rest of the Anglosphere it's insulting.

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