Re: sturdy old apple

[glhansen@steel.ucs.indiana.edu (Gregory L. Hansen)]

In article <ce5jlm$dlb$1@rumours.uwaterloo.ca>,
Tim Haynes <timhaynes@no.spam.please.alumni.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>
>"B.B." <DoNotSpamthegoat4@airmail.net.com.org.gov.tw.ch.ru> wrote in message
>DoNotSpamthegoat4-5A4FBF.21024626072004@library.airnews.net">news:DoNotSpamthegoat4-5A4FBF.21024626072004@library.airnews.net...
>> In article <9bOdnXeRJpyUz5jcRVn-jg@comcast.com>,
>>  "Bill Garber" <willy46pa@comcast DOT net> wrote:
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> >:    How is she degrading them?
>> >
>> >didn't you read the article??? What if you had
>> >a mentally infirmed relative, would you like them
>> >being called "tards"???
>>
>>    I'm the one who posted the link.
>>    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

"Retarded" didn't used to be a slur, it was a clinical term.  E.g. from 
www.dictionary.com, "slow or limited in intellectual or emotional 
development : characterized by mental retardation".  And that is 
completely accurate.  But words get used up and need to be changed now and 
then.  I have a sister who works in a group home, and a friend that had 
worked in a different home for several years.  And the "tards" were called 
residents.  Until it got changed to customers.  And then to consumers.  
And I haven't been keeping track of all of them, but it keeps changing in 
the interest of being sensitive.

At my sister's home the staff just calls them kids.  At the home my friend 
worked at, they didn't even have the language skills, or in many cases 
the ability to hear, such that it would ever have been possible for 
them to take offense-- they didn't have the level of mental development 
required to wipe their own butts, so the workers wiped butts for them.

>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.

It would only be a matter of time.  "Special" is already a slur, e.g. the 
article in The Onion about "the very Special Forces" in Iraq.
-- 
"There's nary an animal alive that can outrun a greased Scotsman!" -- 
Groundskeeper Willy