When you were a kid, you probably called people “retards” when they did something stupid or awkward or were otherwise in need of being insulted. In my neighborhood (in Phoenix), we called them “gompers” instead. If you’re a member of the Texas school board, you may be cheering the fact that we insulted people by branding them as labor organizers, but in fact the only thing we knew about Samuel Gompers was that there was a school for people with developmental disabilities named after him, and if I remember correctly, it was right next to my elementary school. So we were calling people “retards” as well, in our own localized slang.^* (I don’t know if the expression was widely used all over Phoenix, or just common in my neighborhood. I was somehow surprised that the Urban Dictionary has an entry for this usage of the word.)

These days, many of us realize that we shouldn’t call people “retards,” because this usage is offensive to people who actually are retarded (in the clinical sense of the word) and to those who care about them. Of course, we’re not supposed to call retarded people retarded, either, because of the negative connotations the word has taken on through its non-clinical use. Eventually the word will lose its original literal, clinical meaning, and we’ll go back to happily using it as an insult, just as we do with “idiot,” “imbecile,” and “moron,” which all were once clinical terms.^† In the meantime, though, no one can use “retard” in any context at all (you probably shouldn’t even apply fire retardant, to be safe).

This illustrates one of the biggest challenges of life in our present Age of Enlightenment: how do you insult someone without accidentally offending the wrong people?

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