Last Updated on: 14th March 2018, 10:02 am
Gill has a problem with people’s language. I assume this would include some of mine, and that’s ok. I’ve never been one for banning words outright, and that’s not a position I’m likely to ever change or apologize for. It doesn’t work and it’s not that easy. It’s rare that a word or a thing is always wrong. Time, place and context are very important factors that often tend to get overlooked once people decide they’re upset.
About ten years ago this movie called Tropic Thunder came out. It had many flaws from the start. Robert Downy Jr performed in the divisive blackface, and there was a word thrown around liberally. What was that word? “Retard.” No big deal? Rather the opposite, the American Special Olympics president Tim Shriber gathered intellectually challenged people outside an LA theater to protest.
Closer To Home
A few months later my family and I were sitting for Easter dinner, and my sister brought up how good a movie it was. I made a comment about how the word “retard` was tossed around a lot in the movie, and she told me it wasn’t a big deal. It got me to thinking, as someone who has been called that epithet, that Tim Shriber was right.
Question
Do you think this word should be banned, censored, kept, or do you even care?