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'Unalive'
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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They'll just ban the new terms eventually if they get big enough.
It's just another form of taboo for the euphemism treadmill honestly. Like there was a time that what a lot of people now know as the r-slur was a term to try to destigmatize those conditions. When that was the polite and civilized way to refer to someone with developmental or intellectual disabilities. This is just a taboo created top down rather than bottom up.
I mean, when I did physics in high school (in Norwegian) the correct term for something slowing down was retardation, as opposed to speeding up, acceleration.
I wonder if this still is the case, the dictionary is updated all the time, as words take on new meaning, and that's fine. I'm not fussed by the whole master to main in git, for example, though I'd prefer trunk.
I will get unnecessarily vocal if someone makes a point of saying that it's pronounced jif though...
it's definitely still used in aviation, because that kind of thing can never change lest people fucking die because a pilot got confused.
i imagine it's quite a thing to hear the "retard, retard, retard" alarm the first time as an english speaker
flame retardant is still a thing, for fire extinguisher, plus retarding growth of organic systems. just not calling people retarded,.
I'm with you, I didn't mean to say it had the same meaning, just that when one way of using a word becomes wrong to use, we tend to stop using the word all together.
Which, I just want to be absolutely clear about, was not meant as some old man yelling at clouds reaction to language evolving.
Idiot was originally a purely medical term for mental disability, as was moron, retard, and now even the term "mentally disabled" is falling out of favor for "intellectual disability"
they call it "neurodivergent" ive seen gen z get upset over not calling people that.
and we will keep updating the dictionaries until we address the root causes (slow, difficult, and unlikely)