I am of the people whose diagnoses are geometrically and inversely proportional to the historical diagnoses of mental retardation, colloquially truncated to retarded or 'tard. I believe cogency and efficacy of communication trump everything else, probably as a result of said condition. So let me tell you this: I resent the loss of retarded in the lexicon because it is not presently being replaced with anything that has the same blunt force, the same weight. I truly believe there are people who need to hear that what they are doing or saying is so mind-fuckingly stupid that not only should they shut up but in less enlightened eras they would rightly be removed from the gene pool in the most "humane" fashion we could muster.

The people who need to hear it most do not suffer or rejoice as a result of its novel and likely permanent stigma, because for them the liberal tears are far more important, they continue to use it. I believe its general loss will beg the eventual creation of slang terms which will carry the same rhetorical payload, may even become associated with we autists again because despite how this passage may come across, I have always been slow in social settings, enough for it to emerge again and again, from city to city and school to the Navy (where our bete noire was part of the espirit de corps) to various civilian jobs. I'd prefer a bit more stable language, but whatever, this is not something I control. I just think the effort is futile, even... what's the word I'm looking for?

Whatever. They shouldn't face much more consequences than rubbing their face in the fact that if they're trying to score off the slow kid they're not particularly bright themselves. This can be accomplished without turning more and more words and concepts over to the censor.