On my Facebook news feed just now, someone has posted a link to R-word.org, a site which promotes eliminating the "demeaning use of the R-word" -- meaning 'retard', 'retarded', et cetera. They're even promoting 03.03.10 as a day of action and offering themselves as a forum to organize local events to change the conversation. This comes a few weeks after Barack Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, got into hot water for some private remarks in which he disparaged people on the left of his own party as "fucking retarded", and this led to a further kerfuffle involving Sarah Palin's son Trig, who has Down Syndrome.

My two-bit opinion? The R-word is a lost cause, and I hope that those who advocate for people with mental disabilities won't waste too much of their energy trying to rescue it. Once upon a time, psychologists working with mentally limited people decided it would be useful to subdivide them into classes based on how they responded to testing. This is where the words moron, imbecile and idiot come from -- they were originally technical terms that classified descending levels of mental age and IQ. Naturally enough, a certain category of people -- let's call them by the technical term 'assholes' -- found it fun and congenial to use these words for general abuse and disparagement, and didn't worry themselves too much about who else might be pained by hearing them used that way. Psychologists fought back by coining the more humane term 'retarded', to emphasize delay or slowness to develop instead of a lack of capacity. And when those same people (or their spiritual descendants) did the same thing with the new word, psychologists and advocates fought back once more with new, slightly more happy-talk terminology like "mentally challenged". And the process continues.

This is hardly a new phenomenon. Even the word cretin comes from the French chrétien, meaning a Christian. Calling a mentally disabled or deformed person a Christian was a way of using language to remind the more fortunate among us to treat their less fortunate neighbours with respect, and accord them some dignity. But of course, the value of this attempt began to erode immediately, as it always does under the assault of the assholes, until today no one remembers it. I see no reason why this process will ever stop -- at least, as long as there are assholes among us.

The problem with assholes is that their lamentable condition leads them to keep acting the way they do, whether you treat them with respect or with the contempt they deserve. Really, the assholes we will always have with us, so I wouldn't worry about the R-word too much. It's the fight against the assholes among us that really counts.