Is it OK to say the R-word again?

Everyone from Bill Maher to Ricky Gervais has taken to casually dropping the R-bomb to fire up the language scolds.

In November, responding to news that the Biden administration planned to unlock billions in aid to Iran, Donald Trump, Jr. posted on X: “I know you’re not allowed to use the R word that was a big part of our vernacular growing up if you’re my age, but there has to be exceptions, right???”

While the 45th president’s son was shy to say it, former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner was not. “It’s RETARDED that the Biden admin frees up another $10 BILLION to IRAN!” Jenner wrote on X that month. “How about focusing on how dangerous and RETARDED freeing up $10 BILLION to Iran is.”

At a show in Australia in January, American comedian Matt Rife told the audience,  “I think that we start with something that’s been a little heavy on my heart recently . . . I really want the word retarded back.”

He’s not alone. The word retard is having a bit of a renaissance, and for good reason. Everyone from Bill Maher to Ricky Gervais has taken to casually dropping the R-bomb to fire up the language scolds.

There’s a naughtiness to throwing around the word retard because no sensible person is quite sure if it’s offensive or not. It comes from the Latin retardare, or “to make slow, delay, or hinder,” and dates to at least the year 1426. According to linguists, retard is still commonly used in French and Catalan to mean delay, whereas in English over the centuries to decelerate became more common than to retard.  

Retardation first appeared in psychiatric literature in 1895. In the 1960s, retard became the medical establishment’s impartial term to describe mental disability, replacing the words moron, cretin, imbecile, feeble-minded, and idiot—all of which were previously considered neutral terminology. Moron, for example, from the Greek moró for baby, was wholly invented in 1910 by psychologist Henry H. Goddard as an evenhanded way to describe adults with childlike mental abilities. The word, in its original context, is quite sweet.

While all those once-dispassionate terms have gone on to be pejorative, their usage seldom beckons a lecture from politically correct scolds the way retard does today. In 2022, the Washington Post’s advice columnist wrote that using the word retarded was similar to wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat. Both the r-word and MAGA “suggests that you’re sympathetic to fascism,” he wrote.

The U.S. government officially declared retard profanity in 2010 when President Barack Obama signed a law that banned the term mental retardation from reference in federal agencies, to be replaced by mental disability or intellectual disability. Yet, the polite euphemisms currently in vogue--terms like special needs or mentally challenged--are now as much of a taunt as retard ever was. And, inevitably, those terms, too, will be deemed offensive one day.  

In 1974, linguist Sharon Henderson Taylor dubbed this phenomenon the euphemism cycle, a concept later made known by pop-science writer Steven Pinker in a 2003 book, where he called it the euphemism treadmill.

Negro was, of course, a dispassionate term to replace colored people, which had become offensive, which then was superseded by African American, followed by black (now, capital-B Black), and returning, full circle, to people of color.

In the 1960s, gay—a euphemism if ever there was one—replaced the term homosexual. As gay became a schoolyard insult in the 1980s and 1990s, it’s now been replaced by an earlier slur: queer.  Then there’s the journey from Hispanic to Latino to LatinX; cross-dresser to transexual to transgender; homeless person to person experiencing homelessness to unhoused individual; illegal alien to undocumented immigrant; Ad infinitum.

Examples of the euphemism cycle are everywhere and go well beyond the classification of people. The term venereal disease--conjuring the image of a something delivered by seashell from the Roman goddess of love, Venus—was deemed misogynistic in the 1970s and replaced by sexually transmitted disease (STD). But disease made some people feel too dirty and in 2013 the appropriate label became sexually transmitted infection (STI).

None of this jargon is inherently offensive. Rather, it’s the thing being described that these language-tinkerers find repulsive, not the word used to describe it. The endless fussiness, invention, and omphaloskepsis from those who love to dictate language only conveys their deep apprehension to those people and subjects. The ever-evolving euphemism is a symptom of their discomfort and that personal struggle between shame and superiority from which all academics seem to suffer.

Language policers are demented people; they get a cheap thrill from casually exerting control over others. It goes without saying that the same people who shame you for using the word retard would absolutely abort their baby if the child had Down syndrome.

If you’re not easily offended by words, chances are you tend to treat people as individuals, and not part of a collectivist unit. Rejecting the roulette of politically correct labels is a tiny act of rebellion against people who have retarded politics.