ret*d.

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What is it with this word? I was at the mall the other day ago and I heard it used a lot even by people in their 40s and 50s. I heard someone ask someone "are you ret*d?" and the person asking that was a middle aged woman.

Middle-aged and older people probably heard it used more as an insult when they were young. I knew I did, but I didn't like it. I still don't.

Boomers grew up in a time when being PC was reserved for preachers and maiden aunts.

"ret*d" was synonymous with "ignorant", "clueless", "misinformed", and "mistaken".

"Spaz" was synonymous with "clumsy", "uncoordinated", and a general lack of physical grace.

"Queer" was synonymous with "weak", "skinny", "smart", "bookish" and a general lack of interest in sports.

Back then, these words were in common usage by just about everyone, and were little more than just labels.

^ very true.

My mother still calls people mongoloids and boings.

I think some of my friends use it every now and then, and we're all mid-high 20s. I think my Dad's said it a few times, but I mostly hear it from people my own age.

My mother is a boomer and she described me to my ex as a ret*d. She also, embarrassingly described my nephews as ret*d this summer while talking to strangers.
Funnily enough, 20 years ago my sisters asked me whether I thought that our mother was "emotionally ret*d".

It's nothing new, just what linguists call the "euphemism treadmill"; "ret*d" replaced older technical terms like "moron", "imbecile", and "idiot" largely because they'd become common insults.

"Joey" was one I used to get called a lot at school; from a guy called Joey Deacon who had Cerebral Palsy and was featured on one of the kids' TV shows to raise awareness of disabilities. As Wikipedia puts it...

I didn't hear the word "nerd" until "Happy Days."

The term for somebody who was considered smart and clumsy was "egghead."

I used to get homicidal feelings whenever somebody called me a "ret*d."

Queer, where I grew up, meant "gay," "odd," or sometimes even "uncanny."

EggHead was a villain on the old BatMan series with Adam West. He didn't seem clumsy to me.

Egghead, pretty much, came from Adlai Stevenson.

He was a presidential candidate who was known for being very smart and very bald. Eisenhower was bald, too, of course. More bald than Stevenson, actually. But he was a military man. And he always beat Stevenson.

The term was adopted for someone who would have been considered a "nerd" in other times.

Another term that people used for people who were scientifically-inclined (a "geek")was "Poindexter." He was the scientist in "Felix the Cat." He had an extremely high voice.

Eggheads were usually not "Poindexters." Just like "nerds" are frequently not "geeks."

Well... THIS Boomer grew up across the street from a kid with Down's syndrome. A great big friendly well liked but weird looking oaf who never got beyond a five year old in intellect.

So to me "ret*d" means "being like that kid".

So the word means congenitally lacking in intelligence. The same thing as "idiot" or "fool".

But those words were already old fashioned so "ret*d" has more of a painful "kick" (it implies that you would be clinically diagnosed as being stupid).

People are no more, nor less PC today then they were then. Adults never used words like ret*d or spaz. It was all kidspeak.

"ret*d" has been somewhat supplanted lately by "dumb ass".
+++++++++++

But Trogluddite is right. "ret*d" is the fancy French word meaning "delayed" that the psychiatric community adopted for use for "people with sub normal IQ" in the post war era as a euphemism. It was nicer than calling them "imbeciles" and "morons" (those were actual clinical terms in the pre war era).

But by the time we Boomers were in grade school in the 60's the word "ret*d" itself was on our lips as a playground insult.
So the mental health community found new terms to use as euphemisms for "ret*d" (which was originally itself a euphemism) like "impaired".

Yeah "queer" originally originally just meant "odd", or "strange", or even "uncanny".

Then (when my parents were kids in the pre war era) it came to be applied to males who were not very masculine acting. And then it came to mean "male homosexual". I suppose that in some macho blue collar communities any nerdy bookish guy might labeled "queer". But to me "queer" was already quaint and old fashioned by the Seventies when it was replaced by both "gay" and by "fa***t" (positive and negative respectively)as labels for "male homosexual".

In the 1960s, a gay person wasn't "gay" yet. Gay still meant "happy." He was either a "homo" or a "queer."

I started hearing "gay" in the 1970s.

"Lesbian" was sort of an exotic word that I heard occasionally, but didn't know its meaning. I didn't have a concept of a homosexual woman when I was a little kid.

Lesbian is a derivative of Lesbos. Lesbians (capital l) are people from Lesbos. Some Lesbians (people from Lesbos) find it offensive that their word is used for homosexual women.

I believe Lesbian for homosexual woman came about because Sappho, the poet, came from Lesbos, and she wrote erotic poetry about women.

Oh! How could I forget?

Yeah "homo" was the word back in the Sixties. In fact it was sometimes even shortened to form a verb, as in "two guys together in the out house mo'ing off" [having same sex sex).