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Opinion: Palin and Emanuel: A slur? Really?

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Did White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel commit ‘a slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities’ by calling the tactics adopted by some dissident liberal Democrats ‘[expletive] retarded’?

Sarah Palin thinks so (and blogs so), and also thinks Emanuel should be cashiered by President Obama for uttering a word comparable in outrageousness to the N-word. Emanuel has apologized.

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Politically speaking, Emanuel should have done so, even if he wasn’t referring to retarded people, let alone retarded children, and even though he was spouting off in a closed-door meeting. But is ‘retarded’ a hateful word? ‘Retard,’ yes, whether that schoolyard taunt is inflicted on a literally retarded child or a child with normal intelligence. But ‘retarded,’ which began life as a polite euphemism for ‘slow-witted’ or ‘feebleminded,’ isn’t usually thought of as a hateful epithet.

Or is it? I asked my journalism students at George Washington University whether the R word was offensive, and a few said yes -- but mostly because it was used to disparage people who were not retarded. (The analogy is calling something or someone you’re mocking ‘gay’ -- as in ‘school is so gay.’) But is the word itself offensive?

Sociolinguists would say there is no ‘word itself’; society determines what words mean, and whether they are insulting. Fair enough, but in that case ‘intellectually challenged’ or ‘developmentally disabled’ also will become hateful terms. As I have observed before, euphemisms have a short shelf life. Next year Emanuel may be apologizing for calling superliberals ‘special.’

-- Michael McGough

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