On Giving Offense

Recently, somewhat to my chagrin, I have adopted the word "retarded" into my daily vocabulary.  I don't consider this in any way laudable, and I don't intend to advance a defense of my practice.  Just because I enjoy something, that doesn't make it right, is the basic theme of this blog.  What I'm interested in is interrogating what gives the word its appeal to me and its offensive punch.  As for me, I like its sort of Southern US drawl...what're yew, some kine a ree-tawrd?  I also like (if I can move beyond that word association without insulting the South more than is absolutely necessary, as they have their own problems, the poor dears, and besides, the South seems to hate being labeled an intellectually deficient region almost as much as they hate being compelled by judicial fiat to treat fairly the people they had planned to treat like shit) how it is basically the way anybody who doesn't think much of education or curiosity (e.g., a Southerner) calls somebody stupid.  It's a word you might get a slap for saying as a child, which makes saying it at this point in my life kind of giggly and exhilarating. 

As to offense, well, thereby hangs a tale.  A certain portion of a word's offensiveness is tied to its meaning, but obviously not all, or else Richard Herring would genuinely have been censured as much by the BBC for saying "clacka-lacka-dack-dack" as if he'd said "cunty-cunty-cunt-cunt".  There are ways to refer to taboo subjects long and turgid enough to dissipate all but the most histrionic of hurt feelings, and cruel and ugly ways to phrase nice sentiments.  The offense content of swears, slurs et al., then, is mainly the implicit contract that one party ought to intend to give offense, and the other party should be courteous enough to take some of it.  People are always renegotiating one side or the other of this bargain for any term sufficiently charged with vigorous feeling--hence your reclamation efforts, your refusals to let a word "define me", your PC thuggery, your South Park episodes. 

Now, the word retard, as you probably know, is similar to the words moron, idiot, fool, simpleton, imbecile, and cretin, in that it was once advanced as a neutral term for someone with a cognitive  impairment but rapidly increased in pejorative use until its proponents abandoned it and jumped onto a new, more passive term.  Inasmuch as disabilities will likely always carry some stigma that will stick to words used to describe them, this is pretty much a treadmill for disability advocates, which sounds exhausting and disheartening.  "Retarded" is fresh enough as a term created to provoke an outpouring of sympathy that its use as a synonym for "stupid" still carries a shocking and painful sting. 

I should say, here, that like "retarded" I also have a history which does not reflect well on me.  Until I was around seventeen I had a hysterical fear of being perceived as having Down Syndrome by strangers.  I would examine my face in the mirror to make sure that no inadvertent expression would make me look slow.  I knew a couple kids in grade school who seemed to have greater than average learning disabilities--Wayne, my childhood boyfriend for around a week, who manifested an obsession with Chuck Norris before it was ironic to do so, and Michelle, an obese girl with cornrows, who could only discuss the band TLC.  They evoked a certain horror in me, particularly Michelle, whose overuse of ketchup at lunch created in me a longtime aversion to the sauce.  I tried my best to avoid them until they switched schools, just in case. 

In middle school, as a desperately fat, charmless, and unpopular child myself, I was often the remainder of any group-formation exercise, and would as such be placed by the teacher with the autistic or Down's kids.  Rather than risk displaying any kind of warm human fellow-feeling, which frankly I still have yet to develop, I treated them with an arms-length minimal politeness that I'm sure did not endear me, particularly to the autistic ones.  It was essentially a manifestation of my fear that the one thing I believed I had over the other kids, my freakish smarts, would go unrecognized or be stripped from me, and then I would have no way to feel superior (and therefore good about myself) at all. 

I don't mean to conclude with the suggestion that calling things retarded decreased my anxiety around being, if I may slightly misuse the term, socially deprived.  That was resolved instead by finding people who would tolerate me and help me build feelings of worth that wouldn't be so brittle as to shatter if someone didn't think I was smarter than them.  Today, I don't believe too much empathy can damage me, and if someone regards me as a pariah for believing that everyone deserves to be treated with respect and kindness, whether convict or miner or immigrant or ned or misogynist or paedophile or suspected Lockerbomber or bipolar or Israeli, well, I don't think that person is very nice, but I try to see where they're coming from. 

I still use that word, though.