The Strange Return Of The R-Word

We have a rare opportunity to defang a hurtful term. Should we seize it?

Let’s stipulate up front that the word ‘retarded’ and all its variants were banished from our lexicon with good reason. This is a term that is found deeply hurtful by some of society’s most vulnerable individuals. Individuals who are vulnerable through absolutely no fault of their own. It’s hurtful to their families and their friends too.

It is not neutral. It is not “no big deal.” And the thrust of my argument is not going to be “sticks and stones.” It’s not going to be, “chill, guys, it’s just a word.”

It is really not “just a word.”

But the resurgence in popularity of the r-bomb, made possible by the waning ability of the hall monitor class to police online speech, presents us with a unique opportunity. We can fully rob this word of its power to wound. Not just for today, but in perpetuity. If we do it right, it will never come back. At least not as what it once was.

The alternative is to preserve it as a weapon. To let it keep its claws, and allow it to keep slashing at the innocent.

My preference is for the former, but I’ll try briefly to steelman the case for the latter; for keeping it haram.

Words can be strong social indicators. If I call you the n-word, to use an extreme example, I’m not just insulting you, I’m revealing something about myself. About my temperament, my biases, and my morals. That’s all valuable information.

The b-word is another one. It’s one thing for your boyfriend to get angry at you and say something to the effect of, “you’re being so unfair.” It’s quite another if he says, “you’re being such a bitch.”

Language is made both more interesting and more useful by the presence of taboos within it.

I am unconvinced, however, that it’s wise to artificially maintain the hurtfulness of words that describe the severely disabled. If “retard” is incapacitated for that purpose, we don’t have a clear successor in the on-deck circle (which isn’t to say one couldn’t emerge). But these are prime conditions to do some good by killing a harmful insult. And the conditions won’t last long.

I am old enough to remember when the word “retarded” had a clinical and noncontroversial meaning. “Mentally retarded” was commonly used in medical speech and you can still hear it showcased on reruns of shows like ER, in episodes that originally aired well into the late 1990s.

Its derogatory use - “Did you see Dave’s latest? That dude is a serious retard.” - fell out of favor in the middle of that decade. You can almost pinpoint it actually. The two, classic buddy-comedies featuring the late Chris Farley and David Spade - Tommy Boy and Black Sheep - were released March 31st, 1995 and February 2nd, 1996, respectively. Just 10 months apart. Inside those 10 months, American cultural sensibilities changed.

The r-word is used liberally in Tommy Boy, but appears (correct me if I’m wrong on this) not a single time in Black Sheep. Sometime in late 1995 or early 1996, a stake was driven through its heart. It became verboten for comedy. And if memory serves, one heard it less and less in the lunchroom and on the playground starting around then. The penalties for its use stiffened considerably, and eventually, it was just no longer a thing that we said.

Again, this was fitting. “Retarded” was something we actually and non-pejoratively used to describe people with intellectual handicaps. We then appropriated it to mean “anyone who is dumb.” Which was pretty mean, actually. Not just because it’s an unpleasant thing to be called, but because we were using people’s unalterable, life-ruining disabilities to crack wise with each other. We were comparing normally-abled people to the disabled in a way that left no doubt that we thought being disabled was a punchline worthy of mockery.

That was not cool.

But while the r-dragon is once again rearing its ugly head, it is revealing only half of its face. “Retarded” is indeed back in common usage - I not only see it online with rising frequency, it’s said quite often by students at my school. But it only means “a person who is being dumb.” Its association with the disabled is still gone, and no comeback of that clinical meaning seems likely. Furthermore, its dormancy was sufficiently long that you really have to be middle aged or older to even remember the word’s relationship to the impaired.

It’s actually subtly different now than it was in its 90s iteration. This is difficult to quantify, but I’ll give it a shot. Whereas “retarded” used to be a fairly down-the-line stand in for “stupid,” it now means something more like “stupidly out of touch, especially in a political context.”

So, “Storm is hotter than Rogue, you retard,” would have been perfectly normal circa 1994. But it would be surprising to hear today, as no real political dimension relates to X-Man hotness, and the claim that Rogue is hotter than Storm hasn’t been repeatedly debunked. Nor can it be conclusively disproven.

Whereas, “The gender pay gap is more fully explained by work preferences than by discrimination, you retard,” would be closer to today’s mark.

A “retarded” belief of the right might be something like, “Illegal immigration to the United States is a major driver of violent crime.”

A “retarded” belief of the left could be something like, “People are only trans-skeptical because of Jesse Singal and the New York Times op-ed page.”

Definitional drift has happened before, of course. The word “idiot” is plenty rude, but nobody regards its use as problematic. This, in spite of its former, technical meaning: a person with an intellectual disability.

“Idiot” remained in the Iowa State Constitution in this capacity until 2008, and is still in the state constitutions of Mississippi, Kentucky, and Ohio. It appears this way in their sections on voting rights. It only fell out of widespread clinical use in the 1970s, and I can confirm, categorically, that nobody was using “idiot” in the technical sense on any playground I ever graced throughout the 80s or 90s.

If you were to call a person with an intellectual impairment an “idiot” today, you would be being a total dick. What you would not be is in violation of any serious taboo against that word’s usage. It doesn’t take long for these associations to disappear, is my point.

A handicapped person my age or older might still retain painful memories of being called the r-word, or of hearing others called it and knowing it represented a slight against them. The same is surely true for their my-age-or-older friends and families. For many, it will never not be painful to hear that word spoken.

But in trying to snuff it out once more, we risk resurrecting a connection that is, by now, mostly buried. The only way to reproblematize the word is to shine a spotlight on its former meaning, and that carries a considerable risk. Because what if we can’t snuff it out?

The revival of “retarded,” along with its cousin, “that’s gay,”*** is best understood as a part of the wider, anti-woke backlash. Getting to say “that’s retarded” again is like opening a relief valve. It represents a flex against the types of people who took it away in the first place. Where once, there was a political incentive not to use it, there is now a political incentive to use it. It riles up all the right people, and those people aren’t powerful enough to stop it anymore.

***An aside: “that’s gay” is more complicated than the r-word, in my view. By the standards laid out here, we should refuse to allow it back into common use, as “gay” still absolutely means “homosexual,” as well as the more colloquial, “lame and/or fruity.” A counterpoint though: homosexuality is normalized and socially accepted today in a way it was not back in the 90s. Maybe the gay community can withstand the association in a way it couldn’t then. The disabled, however, are still firmly on society’s margins, and may require more careful safeguarding.

If we glue “retarded” back to the mentally and cognitively unwell, then find we can’t get the toothpaste back in the tube, we’ve now got a commonly used word with the power to insult, shame, and hurt the feelings of a group of people who are, for the moment, safe. Let’s think hard about whether that’s a good road to take.

We don’t have long. “Retarded” is back on right-leaning and apolitical media, but I don’t think the Blu*sky people know about it yet. Since they were the ones who killed it last time, they’re likely to be the ones mounting the strongest counteroffensive. If we think such a counteroffensive is misguided, the time to start saying that is now.