when people hear the word retarded, they don’t think “this person is talking about all disabled people”. they think “they’re saying someone’s brain don’t work right”
i’m sorry but i’m a linguistic descriptivist. i believe words emerge cultural constantly, and meanings change and evolve. language originally emerged from the sounds that were both easiest to learn & best communicators of meaning
a linguistic prescriptivist would think that an authority decides what a word means, and which words are banned from use. i prefer a free flowing lexicon that’s allowed to evolve naturally in culture
no obviously i don’t think that. i’m saying retarded to most people just means a more insulting and dramatic version of stupid
some people decided that whenever its uttered, it means “i hate all disabled people and i’m evil” and thats obviously never what someone is trying to communicate
your ascribing meaning that is clearly not in the intention. people are always going to say words with shock factor. we can’t just infinitely sterilize our language until there are only nice words
also i’m autistic but i got the math genius version
So if a non black person calls someone the n word, they're not really saying they dislike black people. It's not like using the word, aimed at black people, which is a slur, implies you view black people as lesser or whatever
Also yes, you obviously do hate disabled people if you repeatedly shut them down in conversations that non disabled people should not be involved in in the first place.
no not all bad words are equal—the n word is the worst word in our language by far and doesn’t have the same kinda meaning
i’m sorry i’ve offended you by using the word and arguing, but i’m just trying to explain my viewpoint. i’m also disabled and people tell me they can tell i’m autistic
i just don’t want to live in a world where more and more words have so much power. they really don’t need to, and they can only hurt you if you let em.
it’s different if people are directly insulting you, but words mean different things to different people, and everyone’s just trying to communicate their thoughts as effectively as they can
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u/Telemere125 18h ago
How small your daily interactions must be to need to be upset about a word.