That is some cognitively impaired shit

My flagrant use of the word retarded has come up in a lot in the past month or so. Most recently, in correspondence with BlogHer. I was like, “Hey! How come I’m never in the headlines?” And they were like, “To be blunt it’s because you use offensive language like retarded.” Sweetpea that’s not blunt that’s just fact. Blunt would be like, no one would ever read your blog so we don’t even bother. But I appreciated the honesty.

People are often surprised to learn I work with retar cognitively impaired* people. Like you become some righteous asshole as soon as you start the job or something. I (mostly) love it but here are some adjectives that would also accurately describe my day

• frustrating
• extremely frustrating
• gross
• confusing
• irritating
• boring
• limiting
• excrutiating
• and on and on

So yeah, I need to be able to have a sense of humor about it. The funny part about me saying retarded is the fact that my clients are constantly saying it. They even call each other retarded. But not in like a mentally challenged way, they use it like we use it. I’m not really defending myself because you’re going to be offended if you’re going to be offended and I’m just going to keep on saying it. I’m just giving you some context, yeah you. You know who you are.

I’m totally in the Mimi Smartypants boat on this one. I think she said something like, “If we can’t use retarded to speak about actual retarded people can’t we use it for the rest of us?” She’s getting at the fact that it should be obvious we aren’t referring to a “special” person when we say retarded. And honestly, any euphemism is equally if not more offensive. How often have you heard someone say special, slow or simple with quotes around it?

When I called my cat retarded, it would have been rude to call her cognitively impaired or whatever the nicety of the moment is. Wouldn’t that be rude to people who are actually dealing with a disability? Not only to the person with a disability but to their family. They aren’t helping a retard they’re caring for a person with a disability. Often families spend all their time and money caring for this one person and comparing my dumb cat to that is um stupid.**  Because my cat is (probably) not cognitively impaired but she is definitely retarded.

Retarded means impeded in some way. Here are some retarded sentences

• Getting home is being retarded by all this traffic
• I’m retarding the growth of my 401(k) by buying all these drugs
• My cat just tried to run outside but was retarded by the screen

Do you see my point? Are we going to start coming up with PC ways to say fire retardant? Because that would be retarded.

Personally, I’d like to see the other blogs BlogHer isn’t linking to because of their offensive content. Not that there’s anything wrong with the ones they are linking to, I’ve just seen them all already.

*And jeez you can’t even use any of the ambiguous words you think are correct because you probably don’t even know what the persons disability is. How would you like it of you had a completely normal mind but were called cognitively impaired or mentally challenged because you used a wheelchair or had a speech impediment? Or if your disability has nothing to do with your development but people insisted on calling you developmentally delayed?

**Much like the time I was talking to this woman and accidentally compared the vet losing my cats ashes to when she went in for surgery and woke up to realize they had performed an unauthorized abortion. Do you see how ridiculous that is? We can’t allow this to continue.

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