Last night on the news some woman from some women's group somewhere was talking about how sexist and offensive some of the Super Bowl commercials were. Specifically the one for the little portable TV thing where it shows the spineless guy with a bra over his shoulder shopping with his girlfriend, carrying all her bags, looking like a zombie, and not being able to watch the big game on TV. And the car commercial where all the guys are talking about taking out the trash and carrying your lip balm and they can man up if they buy the car. Sigh...Come on, folks, lighten up, they are just commercials! If you don't like the advertising, don't buy the product!
Then there is the whole to do about whats his butt in the White House using the 'r' word (retarded...gasp!) in a closed meeting and of course nothing in a closed meeting is really closed, but it's okay for Rush Limbaugh to use the 'r' word, we'll just pretend he didn't say it. I'm thinking that the 'r' word will soon be replaced with the 's' word (special) and now instead of kids on the playground calling each other retards they'll just start calling each other special.
In Ventura there is a thrift store that is called the Retarded Citizens Thrift Store and I'm wondering if they've had to take their sign down yet. They'll have to rename it the Special Citizens Thrift Store.
Keith and I were talking about how terms like idiot, imbecile, and moron were actually commonplace medical terms way back when just like mentally retarded and mongoloid were widely used and commonly accepted, and he told me this story about his grade school days and the special kids.
Back then the special ed kids were kept in their own little part of the public school, no mainstreaming like today, and when he was 6 or 7 his teacher told the class that when they were walking down the halls of the school not to stare at the mongoloids. Well, Keith didn't know what a mongoloid was and this being the time when science fiction shows and movies were rather popular he thought maybe they were aliens from another planet and if he looked at them he might be struck down by a death ray or something. His mom finally explained to him that they were special and were slow, but he still didn't quite get it because they looked like they could walk as fast as he did.
And, I'm sure someone will be offended by that little story.
3 comments:
I know that I will take a beating for it but the word retarded is just another word to me. I think medical people even use it still. To me all it means it to be stunted in some way, like you have can have retarded growth, retarded thinking, and so on and so forth. To me it simply means that you have limitations. You can dress it up and call it this or that challenged or whatever but IMHO it really still means the same damn thing so what exactly is it accomplishing to use these PC words? I have had a retarded, or mentally challenged, whatever family member and quite honestly my family never made a big to do or had a conniption fit over someone using the R word. People use the word "special" too, but aren't we all special in our own way anyway? So I don't get the S word either. Most parents think their kids are special no matter what anyway, so a lot of these words just lose meaning IMHO due to over use and being PC all the time. People tend to need to dress up words they are uncomfortable with, which is why a lot of people "pass on" and "pass away" and are "laid to rest" instead of simply having died. Ask a dead person if he cares which one you use, because dead is dead no matter how you slice it. A lot of these PC words really are used to make the person saying it feel better and not really the person being referred to IMHO. In real life I admit I do use the word retarded. I don't use it on the internet however because I don't want to fight all day long with an entire forum over having used it.
PussDaddy
I totally agree, pussdaddy!
I admit I am not keen on the words imbecile and idiot and stuff, lol. There is just so much more that one could pick as a PC pet peeve IMHO, like bashing gay people or using the N word or other words that bash someone's race or nationality. Stuff like that.
PussDaddy
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