Re: sturdy old apple

["B.B." <DoNotSpamthegoat4@airmail.net.com.org.gov.tw.ch.ru>]

In article <ce5jlm$dlb$1@rumours.uwaterloo.ca>,
 "Tim Haynes" <timhaynes@no.spam.please.alumni.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:

[...]

>>    I mean specifically, how is she degrading them?  I can perfectly
>> understand the gut reaction of people who are offended, but I want to
>> know if anyone who's offended by the site can articulate a reason beyond
>> "It's just wrong."
>>    My personal feelings about people calling my relatives "tards" don't
>> have any bearing on that.
>
>My experience of growing up in a school that had a "special education" wing
>for mentally handicapped children could be informative.  It was drilled into
>us from very early on that you refer to these disabled children as 'special'
>or 'Franklin Wing students' (their rooms were in a wing of the school called
>the Franklin wing).  Calling any of them 'retarded', 'tards', 'cripples',
>etc... would land you a private meeting with the principal.
>
>Since WE were taught that these children need special sensitivity (and,
>moreover, this made sense to us)  I cannot imagine that the person who runs
>this blog, or the place where they work, could have initially ever thought
>that calling such a child a 'tard' was a clean, linguistically neutral
>language token.  It sounds too much like 'retarded', which is usually
>considered a slur.  They should just come clean in their FAQ and admit that
>someone started using the label one day, and it stuck, although they know
>it's wrong. If they really wanted a more positive and useful language token,
>they should consider calling the children 'angels' or 'gels' for short.
>Then they could refer to the children thusly: "I had a hard day today with
>the gels.  One gel did this, the other gel did that...." and nobody would be
>offended.
>
>I personally find it offensive that they could even attempt to justify their
>use of the abbreviated version of 'retard' and expect me to buy their lame
>accusation the reader projecting their biases.  It beggars belief that they
>could truly believe that 'tard' is an inoffensive word and that everybody
>ELSE has the problem if they are upset by the subjecting the children (and
>blog readers) to that phrase.
>
>In short, they are being pedantic to cover up their unwillingness to assign
>dignity to these children in their writing and speech, as well as using a
>commonly recognized abbreviated slur to refer to the disabled.
>
>Cheers
>Tim

   That all seems to boil down to "it's just wrong."
   Yes, I understand that we've all been taught not to use derogatory 
terms, but I want to know why.  How does it degrade the kids?   
Specifically, as it applies to this woman writing about her students in 
a forum they'll never read.
   Seems a straightforward enough question to me.
   I could see how you could carry on an argument based on the failure 
to assign dignity to the children because they're referred to with an 
epithet, but you didn't.  Also, the children are individually referred 
to by their names.  "Tard" only pops up when referring to the group or 
an unnamed individual, so I don't even believe there's an unwillingness 
to assign dignity to them.

-- 
B.B.           --I am not a goat!       thegoat4 at airmail.net