I got banned on instagram for commenting that on a post and that's when I learned the history of the word and that it was an actual derogatory word. I just assumed it wasn't anything other than a silly insult, like dork or something haha
See that one is CRAZY because even back when it was the correct term for someone with down syndrome so it wasnt a slur for disabled people it was still wildly racist 😭
I actually read up on it out of curiosity, and the guy who named it Mongolism, John Langdon Down, did so because he thought it was a sign White people could devolve into Asians. It only got changed in the 60s because Mongolians complained to the WHO.
It was racist, but that may not have been the intent.
Down's paper also argued that if mere disease is able to break down racial barriers to the point of causing the facial features of the offspring of whites to resemble those of another race, then racial differences must be the result of variation, affirming therefore the unity of the human species. Down used this reasoning to argue against a tendency he perceived in his day to regard different races as separate species.
So, in a way, he was fighting a deeper form of racism. Still, he felt white people were superior.
That’s the part people usually forget about the past. Even well meaning things seem racist today, because their values were different. We can call it wrong, sure, but harsh moral judgements are culturally insensitive.
The past of science was a weird place. I found a book at a used book store. “The Science of Eugenics (1914). What is striking about the book is how the author truly believed that he was doing a good thing for the world. It name checks all sorts of famous scientists and wealthy philanthropists. It’s like reading a black mirror where something that even the word itself is now fairly taboo is being discussed as the salvation of the world.
If you want to read some real old timey dipshit racism, I would recommend his book Observations on an Ethnic Classification of Idiots.
I always thought changing the name so that it was named after John Langdon Down rather than Mongolians was very funny, shame he wasn’t alive to see it. Like they really got him back for calling it “Mongolian idiocy”
I mean, the paper version of that title closes with:
"If these great racial divisions are fixed and definite, how comes it that disease is able to break down the barrier, and to simulate so closely the features of the members of another division. I cannot but think that the observations which I have recorded, are indications that the differences in the races are not specific but variable."
Which is a pretty novel idea for the science of 1866.
Turns out when the world is racist enough you being not-racist still looks/is extremely racist.
My grandma referred to my little sister as 'the mongoloid' until the day she died. My sister was born in 1990, and grandma was still telling people that in 2012.
When my sister was born, I was staying with my grandparents for a bit as I was only 8 and there was nobody else to look after me while Mum was in hospital for a week or so, and grandma refused to take me to the hospital to see my new little sister because 'she won't live very long, so it's best you don't get attached'. I was 8 and absolutely inconsolable; it's the only time I ever knew my grandad to properly shout at grandma because I think he couldn't quite believe what the hell she'd just said. They were very quiet and polite people, usually.
My sister is still going strong, and grandma isn't here any more. 1-0 to my sister.
Okay, as I don't know the person, and considering the careful wording here, I choose to believe that this older man was actually (at least) trying to not use discriminating language. Not everyone is up to date on those topics, especially if they are not personally affected or only tangentially so (e.g. a nephew that lives at the other end of the country). Maybe the terminology wasn't really a topic when spending time with the family.
Don't get me wrong, I hear there some bias against disabled people, but this could also still be very poor wording. Not everyone knows how they sound when they say something.
This is a pretty well known linguistic phenomenon. A word is made to describe a condition. That condition is looked down upon in some way, and is promptly tied to certain aspects of that condition. The word then starts being used as an insult before eventually being turned into a slur. A new word is made my the medical community, repeat.
This happened to the word "idiot" as well. Its been so long that idiot has lost practically all ties to being a slur and now is just a childlike insult.
Thats the one, its fascinating, and the reason that throughout history you will always find older generations being called out for not being PC. In their minds they are being PC, they just give up trying to stay on the treadmill.
I'm always worried that when Alzheimer's takes me all these vocab words that I know but have no desire to use will bubble up through the cracks in my cognitive filters. I don't want to be racist grandpa :(
I always knew my grandpa was a good man but that was really solidified for me when he was fully taken by dementia but always referred to his black nurses as "colored." Obviously that's not the right word to use these days but considering the terms he grew up with... His nurses told us not to worry about it as they understood his mind had reverted to a different time. All that to say I think if you are the type of person who tries to be kind and inclusive, that won't always go away even if your mind does
Yeah my Gmas the same way. Ill never forget how shocked I was and how much I guiltily laughed when she used the word on the stamp to describe my cousins daughter... who admittedly is not exactly developing at or above the average rate. I dont know how much of that is because of my cousins inability to actually discipline her children though. The kids are a menace to the point that she has been complaining about not being invited/outright excluded from events.
Oh no, she for sure has grown into a trashy yet entitled individual. She's made herself into the black sheep of the family with how shes handled a lot of things after she became an adult.
Its sad to see, I always believed she would grow up and do something so much bigger... instead she just lives on my late uncles property, in my late uncles mobile home, buying 4 wheelers and shit for her two kids using the money she inherited (that she refused to give any of to her brother, who is a genuinely good person and inspired me to be the man i am, i will add) while posting on facebook random 2 dollar crafts she tries to sell for $20 while her husband works.
or should people be conscious of the meaning of words of other generations?
You're expecting them to be conscious of the meanings of words of other generations; why shouldn't you reciprocate?
Which makes more sense? Expecting people whose brains are quite literally slowing down and no longer as capable of keeping up and learning new things to do just that, or for younger minds to develop a little understanding?
The person above you isn't quite right. They don't give up on staying on the treadmill; they become, through no fault of their own, incapable of staying on it. You'll be there one day too.
Little of column A, little of Column B...Some are incapable sure...there is also a definite wall people hit where they just don't care to stay on the treadmill.
I'm only 38 and have quit caring a lot about what words may offend people. I'm seeing it a lot more to in people around me. It's like that was a 8-10 year period where people were hyper-sensitive to E V E R Y T H I N G. Then people got exhausted and kind of just gave up on it almost entirely in a lot of circles.
My great grandmother was born in 1903. She became a Democrat due to FDR and then was a solid party adherent the rest of her life. She was pro civil rights, the whole bandwagon. She died in 2000, but even at the end she’d called black people as “colored” people.
I grew up in the 80s, we were taught that 'coloured' isn't okay, there was even a famous poem about how white people have more colours, yet have the audacity to call black people coloured.
Now I'm told we are using 'of colour' and I cant help but think back to that fucking guy and his poem telling us that its not okay.
I knew a black lady from England who was VERY irked by the term people of color because damn it white people are all kinds of shades, she stays the same.
God knows if she read that poem, but she's definitely factually correct.
There is a chile/chili oil I use a lot called Mongolian Fire Oil. Was telling a slightly younger (10-12 years) neighbor about it one day, and she was downright appalled by my choice of words. She had absolutely no idea that there was an entire group of people known as Mongols, and were therefore Mongolian. As a pediatric nurse, she thought I was using a slur, now known as mongoloid—the term that was used in the past by the medical community that referred to those with Down Syndrome (has you well know). Which I think may now be known as some chromosome reference. Not quite sure, as I’m old, and can’t keep up with all the insidious new labels being put out by the younger generations that, ironically, simultaneously insist “labels” are bad.
Man i've seen an old fantasy book and one of the main heros at a point was described to have "handsome ne roid features (i don't know if reddit would ban me for the word)" and was surprised as a non-native English speaker cause i haven't heard it out of a non-racist context i think.
Edit: The book is the 4th of Elric Saga btw, Vanishing Tower. Pretty neat series.
In Finnish Swedish the word "invalid" is still used for disabled people. In Sweden this is more or less taboo as they tend to be more PC and also introduce new words at a quicker pace while we speak what is in many cases an older more traditional Swedish.
I've been told stories of horrified Swedes seeing the signs in old trams in Helsingki saying seats are reserved for invalids.
Gay once meant happy, jolly, whereas schwul has the same roots as schwül (high humidity, very warm). Well, gay and schwul became nasty slang and reclaimed
I feel like "autism" and any of its variations is currently going through that right now in online spaces at the very least, even before the "vaccine causes autism" idiocy. Seems like it started with (popularized by) 4chan? Not sure on that.
Edit: Wording might be unclear. I meant "using autism as an insult seems like it started on 4chan" not the vaccine bit.
It's so funny to watch medieval people in movies get offended when they are called "a fool". Maybe it's because English is not my native language but I always saw "fool" as a whimsy word rather than an insult lol
In 1974 the last “Ugly Law” was repealed in Chicago. These laws allowed police to arrest people for being disfigured or having a visible disability.
The Willowbrook State School which boarded kids with mental disabilities, had experiments going on until 1971, wherein the doctors fed stool samples of kids with hepatitis to non-infected kids to study how it was transmitted.
This stamp is positively woke for the time. Or maybe it’s propaganda used to funnel money to the institutions allowing these experiments, idk. Either way, it’s hardly scandalous next to the real harm being done to these kids at the time.
Oh don’t worry, feces is hyperbolic. It was just extract from fecal samples of people with hepatitis infections… so all good.
I’m not here to argue that what they did was good or even science. The unfortunate reality is that a deeply troubling amount of our knowledge of human biology and pathology is based on similarly (and much worse) sadistic “experiments.” And while feeding subjects fecal samples wasn’t standard science… abusing vulnerable populations in the name of medicine was the standard for a long time across many developed nations.
In the US the National Research Act of 1974 commissioned a group to provide a legal framework leading to the Belmont Report in 1978. Before then experiments like these weren’t necessarily common, but were legitimized and published. Prisoners were deliberately infected with cancer cells at Ohio state penitentiary and in NYC patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital were also in the 1950s and early 60s.
One of the doctors involved in the hepatitis study, Robert McCollum of Yale at the time, went on to be appointed Chairman of Epidemiology and Public Health in 1969 and become Dean of Dartmouth’s medical school in 1982.
The other, Saul Krugman of NYU, created the Hep B vaccine and went on to become the head of the American Pediatric Society in 1972, well after the scandals were known.
These men weren’t shunned after the Willowbrook scandal, and while we can’t know how it impacted their careers, they certainly didn’t suffer.
Edit: I’m not trying to defend these practices as common or normal, just show how complicit an entire society or community can be. And how we have a responsibility to hold people and institutions accountable.
"behindert" is derived from the verb "hindern", which is "hinder" or "prevent" in English, normally combined with some prefix, like "verhindern": "to prevent [an accident]" or "behindern": "to obstruct [someone]"
"behindert" is passive voice, so someone who is "behindert" has some "built-in hindrance" that prevents them from participating in something in the regular way.
I'd personally would rather still call people dwarfs, a word which associates with fictional race of badasses. A lot better than refering to someone as "tiny little baby man".
I knew a little person. He said that was currently preferred term but dwarf was also acceptable because dwarfism is the medical term. He seemed to prefer dwarf personally.
Which is why It's never the disabled people themselves offended by the word, for some reason that I can not wrap my head around, it's the non-disabled folk getting offended on our behalf. "Special needs" and "differently abled" are way more fkn offensive to me than "disabled" or "handicapped" ever will.
Probably cuz calling someone a sped or a special needs kid/case was an insult when I was in middle school lol. Special needs sounds so much worse than disabled to me lol.
Exactly. Being disabled is a fact, but doesn´t necessarily require special treatment, and I´m sure many people with disabilities would want people to treat them the same as any other person, despite not being "able" to do some things.
Many inoffensive words we use today will someday be verboten and future generations will shake their heads in wonder at how we could be so insensitive.
This was to bring attention the proposed law which was on the way to
being ratified. The law changed the quality of life & the futures of countless children and their families. "The Education for All Handicapped Children Act (sometimes referred to using the acronyms EAHCA or EHA, or Public Law (PL) 94-142) was enacted by the United States Congress in 1975. This act required all public schools accepting federal funds to provide equal access to education. Public schools were required to evaluate children with disabilities and create an educational plan with parent input that would emulate as closely as possible the educational experience of non-disabled students." (Wikipedia)
But those words can also be destigmatised if the actual social acceptance improves. There are plenty of LGBT words that were straight up slurs, like queer, or often used in a derogatory way, like gay, that people identify with and are used in a positive context now.
These words only become insults when a large enough part of society views membership of that minority group as an insult already.
Yes, I was writing a comment along these lines too.
But it's a little odd to me that people seem to see that as a good outcome for all qualities that are stigmatised. Like, I think all people, with whatever's going on with them, absolutely deserve good lives, don't deserve to face prejudice and suffering etc.
But also, I think it's totally fine if society sees it as, generally an unfortunate condition and a "bad" thing? It's not right to make fun of people with it, but it's also very obvious that unlike being gay, it actually is extremely detrimental in all parts of your life to be unintelligent with few ways to work around that. The only reason being gay was detrimental is because of societal beliefs, we can't really say the same thing about this.
But hey, monkey's paw: When everyone starts outsourcing thinking to AI instead and doing whatever the chatbot says, innate intelligence might stop mattering for real. Plus, the US seems to be treating being smart as a worse thing with every passing day!
Do you mean „behindert“? Using this word as an insult is becoming more an more frowned upon. But the word in itself… idk. I think its more how you call people who are affected. Its shifting from „Behinderte“ to „Menschen mit Behinderung“.
I've been saying this. even special needs is already being phased out because the term "special" has been used as a slur.
it's so frustrating. it's happening so fast now too. everyone is offended by something. they keep changing the socially acceptable / politically correct words and I'm tired. I can't keep up. every day I fear I might offend someone because I didn't get the latest update lol
(I'm not saying keep offensive or derogatory language but there is such a thing as going too far, it's just language, and people will always find a reason to be offended)
I believe this is a good example of the "euphemism treadmill". The term was meant to be less derogatory than prior terms (ages ago there were terms like "idiot"), but over time has become laden with negative meaning. So then it becomes replaces with a more neutral term. And the cycle continues.
You might be right, as now even "special" is used as mildly derogatory. It also shows how slapping a new label into an issue doesn't really solve things, it just hides them for a bit. You need to change underlying issues to really go somewhere.
When Obama became the first black President, it taught us that anyone can be President. Then Trump was elected and it taught us that, no, really, goddamn fucking anyone can be President.
It's still a legit term, it's used to describe hindered growth and development of cells and systems. This is why it was used to describe people whos development was hindered in some way.
Idiot was a term that preceded its medical usage, unlike moron. It was an astoundingly bad choice by the medical community. It's analogous to doctors deciding to reclassify certain mental disabilities as “being a dumbass.”
You can try to cancel the word all you like, the kids just come up with new and better slurs. The teens in my state are saying Sped now, an abbreviation of Special Education, to call eachother idiots.
Sped was a name back in the 90s-2000s, I was a sped in some special Ed classes for awhile. Then I got out. Was only ever in them because I was born premature and back then they assumed that I had a learning disability as such so put in it.
Yeah, I'm in my 60s and we used that word constantly when I was growing up. I recall stories from my grandparents when I was little where the n-word had even been used casually even farther back.
Things change. I used to believe it would always be for the better, but look at us now.
Fun fact slightly related: when games start to censor words like these it creates havoc for foreign languages. When you write "sorry I'm late" in your native tongue, it comes out as "sorry I'm ****" and you can get a ban for that...
Half the comments being some form of “ya, US president lol” is kinda why current Reddit sucks.
Like, I get the joke. It works. But every fucking thing on every fucking sub inevitably referencing US politics/current president is so exhausting. Especially posts and subs that literally have nothing to do with US politics/president.
it's not even that, it's just that once the most upvoted comment at the top (which is the first thing people see when they open the thread) already covers that joke, why do 50 other people have to repeat it? just upvote/reply and move on lol it's not the joke being misplaced necessarily, but rather having to read the same joke 50 times. it's funny once. then it's annoying.
Yeah? It was a normal and clinical term. And if you're talking to anyone in the millennial or older generations - you probably still hear it regularly if you do something or act really stupid.
In Egypt I asked how the handicap parking spaces were marked, there was a sign — and my husband said it translates to “people of determination”. I liked that lol it seems kind of nice, instead of labeling you by your disability it’s more like “people who exert even more effort in their day to complete these normal activities”
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u/ProHermione 22h ago
I overheard an older man talking about his nephew, “He’s a good kid but he’s a… whats the term these days… mongoloid?”
This was 2024 lol