I wasn’t even AWARE that spaz had anything to do with people with CP. It’s a fairly common word among my peers and not an incredibly insulting one – descriptor similar to klutzy, usually.

But the point mentioned with ’sinister’ makes me even more argh because I am a fairly angry and foul-mouthed person and I AM RUNNING OUT OF WORDS HERE PEOPLE. Anything that’s going to be an insult is going to be taken from some ‘bad’ quality so….. where do you draw the line? Obviously I’m still going to try and cut out retarded, but things like lame and dumb are really divorced from their original meaning now. (There was a commenter up there who thought dumb meant deaf, which is kind of proof of how the original meaning is lost. It means *mute*, not deaf. ie, ’struck dumb with awe’.)

Should I even start on other words, like cunt? Didn’t see that mentioned before, know that the deragatory reference to female genitals is bad. My fiance counteracts that by just using words for male genitals instead. (I only use cunt when I’m in serious pain or really really mad, either way stringing together every curse I can think of: shitfuckdamncuntbitchcock sort of thing.)

(On a side note, I’ve been active lately in a usenet group that has a lot of posters who have been abused and find various things triggering, and there are a LOT of words that have, say, religious or sexual implications that I have to cut out or * the vowels in and it’s interesting how hard it is to think of an alternative sometimes.)

Sorry, rambly.

Even then, the original words don’t go away. We just forget where they came from.

When’s the last time you had a left-handed person remind you not to use the hurtful adjective “sinister?”

Unfortunately for people like my son, intelligence (and especially verbal intelligence!) is becoming MORE important, not less, and I just don’t think the stigma attached to a lack thereof will go away entirely in our lifetimes.

You’d think “Aspergers syndrome” would be hard to turn into an insult, but I’ve heard people use that with a whole lot more flint than “retard.”

If “retarded” isn’t what they mark on your child’s medical record, you just aren’t going to care as much if someone describes their boss as a “retard” at your backyard BBQ.

We hardly have any insults at all that don’t stem from comparing your antagonist to something, or someone, that both parties recognize as being Real Bad, so dreadful that the antagonist will presumably do ANYTHING to distance themselves from it.

Even the funny substitution “Republican” would really only burn in the social circles that tend to universally view Republicans as a party comprised of rustic dummies. It’s the implication that the person you’re insulting as about as vapid and low-rent as Rush Limbaugh that stings.

Very true. But still, using “retarded” playfully doesn’t make it any less painful for many people to hear.

“Special needs” and “developmentally delayed” seem to be the broader labels of choice these days.

If it’s not being much used as an official clinical term, I imagine the sting of literality in “retard” will quickly lose its power among the younger generation. And it’ll become a bit softer as an insult, as well; I already hear people my age using it more playfully than with real hostility.

Something edgier must rise to take its place! lol.

I mean “jerk” is short for “jerk-off” right? with the implied premise that the dude in question is SUCH A LOSER that he…. masturbates. (the shock!)

And I don’t know whether “suck” derives from “dick sucking” or “egg sucking” or something else, but I doubt its origins were entirely innocuous and unhurtful, either.

Fact is, it’s just hard to insult someone satisfactorily without trashing someone else out in the process.

Another favorite: the English language’s alteration of the meanings of words for right-handedness in Latin or French (dexter, droit) into words for skill and competence, and correspondingly, words for left-handedness (sinister, gauche) into words with connotations of evil or social awkwardness.

That is SO amazingly the case with the kind of language we’re talking about here. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a human being referred to as lame or dumb in the original, literal sense, yet the metaphorical sense flourishes. (Retarded is one that I think I’ve seen make the switch within my lifetime, although its status is still ambiguous enough that it can make Sweet Machine and people with similar experiences hurt.) In the case of words like idiot and imbecile, it seems that their meanings have changed from a perceived immutable state of being to a descriptor for someone whose actions repeatedly show poor decision-making or lack of reflection. That is, it’s gone from something you can change to something you can’t, or from a simple statement of fact to a judgment.

I guess the take-home from all of this is that the metaphorical so totally replaces the literal that people forget original meanings, if they ever knew them in the first place. We all probably knew that, at least on a subconscious level. I would like to see us come up with a new set of withering put-downs that don’t come with this historical baggage. Let’s go directly to the metaphorical! (Great battle cry, isn’t it?)

I’ll go first.

Plarpic. adj. Hastily or poorly-reasoned; often the result of unexamined prejudices.

“That is one of the most plarpic arguments I’ve ever heard.”

Obniork. noun. Willfully ignorant or unreflective person, often one whose careless and plarpic comments wound.

“Why do you have to be such an obniork all the time?”

It’s a start. I’m also trying to put together a good word for the media-defined, elusive, relative, and ultimately unattainable body size and shape that we’ve had to use the unsatisfactory term “normal” for around here.