by Gary Maclean

Created on: October 09, 2008   Last Updated: April 23, 2010

At times I feel we may accommodate everything too much. I think the practice of giving every negative human trait a name of a disease or a set of initials, contributes to our belief that we are in control of nothing. Anything that does go wrong is purely a result of some sort of exotic disease. In a way, the use of the words retard or retarded is similar to that.

In the first place, the word retard really does mean to slow something down. In industry we purposely "retard" specific machinery to control the process. It is a word used to describe individuals who are slower at comprehending ideas than others; they are retarded, or slowed down. The word means that, there is no refuting that, that's what it is. To not use it and to come up with some other elaborate terminology, special, unique, individual, to refer to a group of people who may require assistance with learning, doesn't do away with the problem. What that does is replace one unattractive term with another, that's all.

When I was a kid we would casually call each other "retard" if we did something stupid. That was the true slang use of the word. We weren't referring to each other as actually being in that group of individuals who really do have trouble comprehending. We were simply slamming each other because we did something stupid. Now, we could have replaced that term "retard" with something like "stupid" or "idiot" but do they sound any better?

The fact is, when I was a kid, if we did something totally stupid then we were going to get "ragged" on. There, another one of those ugly slang terms that kids use to describe a behavior where someone teases or chastises someone else. We would get ragged on by being called "retarded." Not nice, and certainly not attractive, but surely not criminal.

Using terms such as "retard" in that manner is using them in the slang sense but I don't think it damages anything. Again, when I was a kid, there wasn't a one of us who would ever even consider calling a true "retard", retarded. We just didn't call them anything. There was no reason to call them anything. The schools already did a good enough job of singling them out by placing them in "Special Education" in the same school building we all went to. Why call them anything when the organization who should be trying to protect them has already branded them.

I'm sure we have all heard "He rides the short bus." Where did that come from? Well, it came from the fact that a short bus would typically be

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