Sarah and I were in the car, going out to dinner and a movie. While we were waiting for a traffic light to change, NPR began a segment on the “R word.” Retarded. The piece was about a crusade to classify the word as hate speech, and to replace it with the term “intellectually disabled.” A father of a girl with Down syndrome was being interviewed, and told of the time he was yelling at a person who had cut him off in traffic: “And I actually said that word, and then I stopped the car and got teary, and I thought, Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I just said that.”
Sarah, twenty-two, was sitting in the passenger seat, her pocketbook on the floor between her feet. Her lips moved as she had a silent conversation with herself. She didn’t seem to hear the radio.
Retarded. It’s a word that’ll get the hackles up. Of course, it’s better than “idiot,” “moron,” “imbecile,” and “feeble-minded,” all of which were coined as medical terms—technical terms—each one designating a specific IQ range. Over time, popular culture coopted the words, until the Three Stooges used them as often as eye-pokes and dope-slaps.
We’ve been converting medical terms into terms of derision for over a century. In 1887, John Langdon Down gave a series of lectures to the Medical Society of London. “The gradations of mental incapacity are as numerous and delicate as those of mental capacity among those who are doing the world’s work. The division, therefore, into imbeciles and idiots is thoroughly wrong and misleading. I have no great liking for the term idiot. It is so frequently the name of reproach.”50 He goes on to say, “The term idiot might be advantageously replaced by that of feeble-minded, idiocy being in fact mental feebleness depending on malnutrition or disease of the nervous centres taking place anterior to birth or during the developmental years of childhood and youth.” He was unsuccessful in his attempt to purge the term “idiot” from the medical literature, and in fact used it when defining the “mongolian” type of idiocy, which has since been renamed Down syndrome or trisomy 21.51
The term “mental retardation” was initially used as a purely medical term. But in the 1960s it, too, became a term of derision.
The National Down Syndrome Society prefers “intellectual disability” over “mental retardation,” and I have heard parents of Down syndrome use the term “developmentally delayed,” a term I’ve used in the past. I feel an inward cringe when I hear “mentally retarded,” which sounds almost as bad as “feeble-minded,” but both terms seem more honest than “developmentally delayed,” which implies that if we all work hard enough, and wait long enough, Sarah will “get there.” But Sarah knows that no matter how diligently she works, she will always have Down syndrome. She will never “catch up.”
It seems that even the most carefully formulated nomenclature will eventually be corrupted: the term “special” has been turned into a singsong taunt on school yard playgrounds. I wonder how long it will take for “intellectual disability” to sound as antiquated and pejorative as “feeble-minded.”
“They don’t know how it feels,” Sam said one day after school. He was twelve. A quick and physical kid, Sam would rather jump than worry about where he was going to land. One of his buddies had been imitating a “retard” while everyone laughed.
“I wanted to punch him out.” Sam sat forward, face set, his eyes glistening with tears. “They’ve got no idea what it’s like.”
Sally was proud that he didn’t hit the kid.
I was proud that he wanted to.
The car’s radio continued with the story of the dad who had yelled the R word and subsequently started an “anti–R word campaign.” He wanted to have the word “retarded” bleeped from television shows, and had written letters to every commissioner of the FCC, the President of the United States, and even Oprah. I wondered if he wasn’t taking it a bit far: I mean, he had used the word himself with his intellectually disabled daughter sitting right behind him.
It’s not a word I’ve used in traffic. I’ve muttered “asshole” when another driver has cut me off. There are lots of other words I’m not proud of using. On the occasions that Sarah has heard me curse, she laughed loudly and said, “Busted!!!” smacking her palm against her thigh, turning to see if anyone has witnessed her catching me using crude language.
The word “retarded” blurted out of the radio speakers a few more times. I glanced over at Sarah. She appeared oblivious.
“What do you think?” I asked her.
She startled. “What?”
“What do you think about this?” I pointed toward the radio.
“I wasn’t listening.”
“It’s about the word ‘retarded.’ ”
“Oh.” She looked at the car’s radio, and didn’t say anything.
“Does it bother you?” I asked.
“It depends,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact. “If a staff member says it, that’s one thing.” She turned toward me, and frowned. “But if someone says, ‘you retard,’ that’s different.” Her voice sounded scornful when she said “retard.”
“Fair enough,” I said. The car behind me honked. I glanced at the traffic light. It was green. We drove a few blocks without talking. I was proud that Sarah could tease out the nuances of language, but I wondered if something so hurtful could really be so cut and dried.
“It’s a stereotype,” she said at the next traffic light. “And it’s mean.”