I don’t have many gen z people in my immediate circles, but something I’ve noticed online re-emerging in the last couple of years is the use of “retarded” as an insult.
I can’t definitively point to gen z as the culprits, I can’t really know who’s behind a username in most cases, it could just be that older generations have found their way to the parts of the internet that I inhabit, or may I’ve migrated to theirs as I’ve gotten older, or that overall attitudes have shifted, but it does sort of coincide with when I figured the younger half of gen z would be hitting the sort of “grown-up” internet.
Maybe I was in some sort of bubble, but for around a decade it felt like that was something we managed to mostly scrub from our vocabulary. It was honestly a little jarring to see it again, like I’d suddenly been transported 20 years back in time surrounded by assholes from my middle or high school.
Tbf retarded is just synonymous with stupid at this point. Nobody is retarded in a medical context anymore afaik. Gen Z probably wasn’t even alive when the term meant anything but an insult
Retarded was an archaic medical diagnosis for a group of things. It literally just means slow. Nobody is actually “retarded” today. There is a fundamental difference between those words. One can literally apply to anyone and one is explicitly used to insult an obvious and immutable characteristic.
I don’t have many gen z people in my immediate circles, but something I’ve noticed online re-emerging in the last couple of years is the use of “retarded” as an insult.
I can’t definitively point to gen z as the culprits, I can’t really know who’s behind a username in most cases, it could just be that older generations have found their way to the parts of the internet that I inhabit, or may I’ve migrated to theirs as I’ve gotten older, or that overall attitudes have shifted, but it does sort of coincide with when I figured the younger half of gen z would be hitting the sort of “grown-up” internet.
Maybe I was in some sort of bubble, but for around a decade it felt like that was something we managed to mostly scrub from our vocabulary. It was honestly a little jarring to see it again, like I’d suddenly been transported 20 years back in time surrounded by assholes from my middle or high school.
Tbf retarded is just synonymous with stupid at this point. Nobody is retarded in a medical context anymore afaik. Gen Z probably wasn’t even alive when the term meant anything but an insult
And the n-word is synonymous with “black person,” doesn’t make it any more ok or less hurtful to use it.
Retarded was an archaic medical diagnosis for a group of things. It literally just means slow. Nobody is actually “retarded” today. There is a fundamental difference between those words. One can literally apply to anyone and one is explicitly used to insult an obvious and immutable characteristic.