I want to take back ‘Retard’. Because I want it to apply to things that are infuriatingly stupid, instead of it being used as a derogatory term towards special needs people.
Bohunk. I hate that it’s a slur for some folk, but it is the perfect term for whatever this hyper-masculine cringefest is we got goin’ on. Alpha male chest beaters stinkin’ up the place. Those damned bohunks.
Never heard that term before.
The replacement for “this is retarded” I’ve started to use is ~ “I guess someone had to leave early for the weekend. ‘Good enough, let’s ship this and go home.’” with me gesturing like Khaby Lame at, e.g., obviously broken email validation field.
It isn’t quite as snappy, but at least my disappointment tend to come across.
Closed.
A valve is closed if it doesn’t allow water to travel through it. The circuit is closed if it allows electricity to travel through it. Some valves you have to close the circuit to close the valve, some valves you have to open the circuit to close the valve.
Can we just use closed only for circuits and make valves use a different word?
how bout “nopen”
Closen’t
So I think there’s a bit of crossing of wires (pun maybe intended) when it comes understanding both concepts. For water a valve acts as a door, open doors let things through, closed doors block things from moving.
For circuits, I believe closed comes from a more mathematical thing where closed more means without holes/gaps. So the circuit is open when there is a gap in the circuit as a whole.
I think the real confusion occurs when in high school physics classes there is a segment about flowing water in preparation for the next chapter on electricity and circuits.
I find the real confusion when multiple people are designing a chemical factory. Those are dampers so they the circuit is closed to close the valve, those are for the pump so the circuit is closed to open.
Yeah that’s a good point.
Gay… I’m old enough to remember when it just meant happy… We even had to change a friend’s nickname when the usage changed … His name is Ben, and we called him Bengay at first (like the muscle rub) which shortened to Gay… We would literally refer to him as Gay and call him that in public with no problem… Then things changed and we couldn’t call him that anymore. I’d like Gay back
I had a friend in kindergarten, his older brother was named Guy.
Iirc, he was gay.
Lol
Born in the fifties? You must have seen a lot more than that change
1961 and yes, but you don’t want me to list all the changes I’ve seen lol, that would be a few books, I just answered the question about a word change I’d like back, first one that came to mind, and now you are trying to provoke me into a boomer rant
You could do an ama. I remember on Reddit back when AMAs were with ordinary people.
ABA - Ask Boomer Anything
Like what was it like to have no contact with anyone while you drove your car home, and then you get home to check your answering machine to see if anybody tried to contact you
Why not just call those things infuriating, bad, counterproductive, ruinous, negligent, futile, aggravating, or shitty?
“Retarded” originated as a medical euphemism for what is now sometimes called “developmental delay”: some kid didn’t learn to walk or talk or read or behave himself by the usual age. As a verb, “to retard” is “to slow down”; it’s cognate to “tardy” meaning “late for class”.
The original sense of “retarded” was about people with disabilities.
It was only used as a slang insult among schoolchildren because their teachers were using it as a medically descriptive term: “Be patient with Kevin; he’s retarded.”
The point of calling your friend Billy “a retard” as an insult was that you were comparing him to Kevin. The point of calling the school rules “retarded” was that you were comparing them to Kevin.
The whole reason that you think “retarded” can mean “infuriatingly stupid” is that Kevin flails and babbles because of his disability, and you’re used to being infuriated by him instead of being patient with him like the teacher told you to.
You getting to use “retard” to mean something other than a disability insult is not “reclaiming” a slur. That’s not what “reclaiming” means.
Reclaiming a slur is when the gay activist group calls itself Queer Nation, not when a straight person decides they want to say “queer” as a generic insult. It’s when they say “Sure, you go ahead and call me ‘queer’ — because I’m going to use that as a good thing.”
Reclaiming a slur is when we stopped saying “No, we’re not nerds, stop calling us nerds, you mean jocks!” and started saying “Yes, we are nerds, nerd culture is awesome, you wish you were us.”
I think the thing about the word “retard” is that it’s not so much about something being aggravating as it is about something being absolutely stupid. It has these hard consonants that make it sound powerful when it’s said. It’s effective, and it’s really uncomfortable to hear. It’s the fuck of the moron/idiot family of words.
And we’ve got this reality where there’s variability in how smart people are. And then people with developmental delays get tossed into the extreme end of the scale with medical terminology, and so that gives people an easy word to use when someone is acting on the extreme end of “not smart”. And then the word becomes a slur, and then a new word gets coined that’s medical and not a slur, and then it gets co-opted as a slur, and so on.
And it’s not gonna stop, because sometimes you do gotta call out someone for making stupid decisions, especially when their idiocy is causing harm. It’s just we’ve also got assholes around, but those people will insult more than just someone’s brain, they’ll go for anything that hurts.
You made me look up the etymology and NGL I always thought it must be from “en retard”, late, for some reason. Like because if you’re late you’re delayed and “retarded people” have developmental delays or something. The real etymology kind of makes more sense though.
You’re not wrong either, it does ultimately derive from Latin ‘tardus’ meaning ‘late’, it just took a slight detour in French.
I would like to reclaim the word pariah, erase it’s existence and swap it with pariyah (pronounced purr-E-yeah), the plural form of pari (purr-E), meaning angels.
Pariah comes from the word Paraiyar (drummers). Paraiyar are a lower caste group from Tamil Nadu, a southern state in India, whose job revolved around drumming and witchcraft.
As if weaponization of this word from a caste to a slur wasn’t enough, the colonialist repurposed it, and made it international.
I can’t even imagine being a Paraiyar folks, and having to hear this word everyday.
If it helps, remove the word pariah from your vocabulary.
TIL thanks.
Be careful. The word only took on its perjorative meaning because of the connection to various groups of special needs people. Before then, the noun form was pretty much nonexistent, and the adjective and verb forms were boring latinate terms meaning “slow(ed) down.”
I bake bread. My loaves are often retarded.
Not enough people consider the origin of these words, trying to use them divorced from the thing that actually makes it a pejorative. Growing up, “gay” was another one people tried to use as an insult “non-homophobically”
It’s poisonous for a reason
Pineapple. Just use ananas like the rest of the world.
It’s not from a pine tree and it’s not an apple.
not sure what “rest of the world” is because there’s so many languages. i know that portuguese calls it “abacaxi” (“xi” is pronounced “she”)
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Ah, there’s an old image showing this. I guess it’s not ananas in every language, but it is a lot of them!
Portuguese is even on this list, but modified with (eu). What does that mean?
EU means Europe (so european portuguese), which has a few more pronounced differences compared to brazilian portuguese compared to the difference between US english and UK english
Probably, like Spanish, that it has a separate language spun off in Latin America that’s “the same language” but only mostly. I think they branch more than, e.g., a southern dialect vs England, but I don’t know enough of the different versions to know if that’s real or not.
Way too close to bananas for my liking.
What we’ve got isnt too close to apples?
I have the same issue with Kansas and Arkansas.
Yeah, “Can you go to the store to grab anananas?” is going to get me to bring bananas home every time.
I still say it but I don’t type it on social media anymore since people get upset.
To me it’s exactly what you wrote and obviously not about being diragatory against special needs people. It never was used like that ever.
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Language evolves with certain words becoming offensive. You’re contradicting yourself.
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I don’t even know what you’re saying anymore. Looks like you want language to evolve, but not the way you don’t want it to. Thus the contradiction.
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Why not reclaim idiot, or moron. They both had very specific meanings in the past before they got slangified
Also referring to people with cognitive/developmental disabilities, just longer ago
People with disabilities get a rough go. Every word they have gets turned into a slur.
Same with cretin, imbecile, etc.
I was discussing with friends how few options there are to insult someone jokingly without it being rooted in ableism or some other shitty prejudiced history. Along those lines, we concluded that the word “muppet” is great.
Like “Ann, you absolute muppet, get over here”.
not its meaning, but its pronunciation. Segue. it should be pronounced ‘segg’ not ‘segway’ and nothing you can say or do will ever change my mind on this.
Segg makes 0 sense to me
I had to google the word tbh. My first instinct on reading segue was treating it like fugue, which ends on a hard g.
fugue, plague, vague, hell QUEUE doesn’t pronounce the ‘ue’ twice.
I could perhaps accept it being ‘segg-ew’ in the same vein as “venue”, “continue”, etc.
It IS pronounced “segg”.
“Segueway” is a separate word.
Edit: Nope, I’m completely wrong. On both counts. “Segueway” is a misspelling of “segue”, which IS pronounced “segg-whey” because it comes from Italian, not French..
Being an Italian word, it’s pronounced seg-weh, so not far from segway
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Cringe. Recently learned that “the youths” have basically morphed the phrase into just meaning “anything bad”. Like, that word was so useful though to specifically mean “something that someone does which flies in the face of social norms to which they are oblivious, but which makes onlookers uncomfortable”. That word condensed a damn paragraph and I want it back
I’d redefine “woke” as “I’m going to blame this all on you, but really it’s me. Your issue doesn’t affect me directly, but I don’t like it and I can’t explain why, I can’t even explain it to myself. But I don’t want to discuss it or understand you. I just want to shut down this conversation because it might expose my lack of thinking past my own nose and empathy, because ughhhhh empathy.”
