Feb 27, 2026
For context, as soon as I say the word "retard" at a party, people will look at me like I just committed murder in broad daylight. This is super absurd to me because taking offense to this word stems from a clear misunderstanding in basic etymology.
So, the word retard is deemed offensive because it refers to people with disabilities, and using it as a swear word implies that disabled people are inferior to abled people. However, just take a second to look at the origin of these words:
Bastard — From Old French bastard, likely from fils de bast ("packsaddle son"), implying a child conceived on an improvised bed rather than a marriage bed. It originally meant a person born out of wedlock, which carried severe social and legal stigma.
Lame — Originally a straightforward Old English term (lama) for someone who couldn't walk or had a physical disability. Its evolution into meaning "uncool" or "pathetic" directly equates physical disability with worthlessness. This is one of the clearest examples of ableism embedded in casual language.
Barbarian — From Greek barbaros, which was an onomatopoeia — to Greek ears, foreign languages sounded like "bar bar bar." It encodes the idea that anyone who doesn't speak your language is uncivilized.
Dumb — From Old English dumb, meaning unable to speak (mute). German dumm means "stupid," and English eventually absorbed that meaning too. The shift reveals a deep prejudice equating the inability to speak with a lack of intelligence.
All these words have offensive origins. Does that mean we should stop using them? Of course not! Language is something that evolves over time and all the words listed above have morphed into meanings that are distant from their etymological roots. Therefore, it is frankly stupid to stop yourself from using words with offensive roots, and it is even dumber to impose moral judgment to those who use words of such nature.
What's interesting is that this dumb movement seems to happen globally. In South Korea, the city of Seoul initiated a movement to encourage people to stop using the word "유모차" because it embeds the word "mother" (母/모) into the name for stroller, literally meaning "milk-mother-vehicle" (乳母車).
In conclusion, I'll continue to say retard because, like everyone who uses the word "retard", I'm just referring to a person who did something silly, and the image of a disabled person doesn't even cross my mind when I use that word. Also, I get to detect people who masturbate to the feeling of claiming moral high ground so that they can feed their narcissistic egos.
Part 2.
As I was re-drafting my essay I came across this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/80aelg/cmv_there_is_nothing_inherently_wrong_with_the/
The top comment goes as the following: "The point of yelling at people for calling things 'retarded' is to remind them that people with disabilities are still people, that their existence should not be casually lobbed as an insult, that they still deserve our empathy and respect, that the contempt shown in using their terminology in this way is cruel and counter-productive."
So basically, the word "retard" is offensive because it's using disabled people as an insult, degrading their worth as human beings. I decided to write the second part to this post just to highlight how this Occam's razor might be the stupidest comment I've ever seen.
We say words like "low IQ, braindead, mentally ill" as insults all the time. This is not because we see people with mental illnesses or low intelligence as inferior beings to us but because it is an undesirable and unfortunate circumstance. That's in fact what almost all slurs and insults have in common: they describe the possibility of an undesirable phenomenon happening, so that it conveys the purpose of irritating someone.
In fact, that's why insults like the f-word or the n-word are considered unacceptable. They imply that being of African descent or being homosexual is somehow an unfortunate circumstance when it clearly isn't.
Side Note: English is my 2nd language, and I only really realized that the word "retard" referred to disabled people when I was like ~16. Thus, my perception of the word may be very distant to native English speakers, and that's what's led me to have this contrarian opinion. But I still felt like it was an interesting thought to share. If you disagree, then please text me cuz I think I feel like I might be missing something.