On this week’s “Talk the Talk”, we discussed the use of the word ‘retarded’. Do you use the r-word? Would you ever describe someone as a ‘retard’?
The issue has come to the fore in recent weeks as Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, used the word to describe Democrats that criticised other Democrats — and subsequently apologised. “Rosa’s Law” has been introduced as a bill to the federal legislature, which would prohibit the use of the r-word in federal documents. And if you’re willing to never use the word again, you can take the the ‘r-word’ pledge.
Or you can just listen to me talking about it on RTRFM.
I’m on about 5/6ths of the way through the stream. Watch out; it starts playing as soon as the page loads.
10 February 2010 at 4:37 pm
I confess I do use the word, and I feel guilty about it because I know how hard that must be to raise a retarded child. I am sure if one of my kids was mentally retarded I would cringe whenever I heard the word. Thanks for the reminder to be considerate of others in our choice of words.
10 February 2010 at 5:07 pm
I use it, but it's a bad habit I'm in the process of trying to break. A lot of times, the use of offensive slang is just laziness–and if we stopped and thought about it, we could find a more effective, precise (and less offensive) way to get the point across. I'm hitting the thesaurus.