are you on fucking meth? jesus christ there is no way "freak" is worse than "retarded" and you were not using it as a proper scientific term but as a pejorative. for fuck's sake. that's all i have to say on this, i'm done with this, you're so far behind you think your first.
I'm upset people didn't call Khad out for using freak a far worse them but called me out for using the still mostly proper term. It is like getting called out for using the word gay from someone using the term fag. As for parents they probably do believe by changing terminology they will stop the stigma but it won't and I don't think it is honest of the left to not be truthful and tell them they are just dealing with a symptom.
science, including terminology, is constantly changing and developmentally delayed is simply the newest and preferred term, as mental retardation once was and cretin, idiot, imbecile, mongolism, etc before it. these changes have all occurred because the term became a pejorative rather than a strictly medical classification and new terms were developed to both remove the pejorative and better describe the condition. and i'm sure it will be annoying to "print up whole new forms, databases, text books,ect," as it must have been when being gay stopped being a disease and mongoloid, caucasoid and negroid stopped being appropriate or accurate terms, but that's progress. furthermore, i am more inclined to take the side of the parents and caretakers of the developmentally delayed as well as medical professionals rather than a wingnut on the internet who is upset they got called out for using "retarded" as a pejorative.
Think about it the mental health profession changing away from the word will do practically nothing since they rarely mean any harm in using it yet those who with to do use it to intentionally harm those with the condition will continue to use it and the substitutes thus all you'd do it giving bullies a larger vocabulary of words to insult those with the condition. Meanwhile those the mental health profession will have to print up whole new forms, databases, text books,ect costing labor value for very little benefit to society if any as in a decade or so they will be right back to where they started and there will be a movement to change the terminology again because too many people use the new terminology as a insult.
now you're just being asinine.
You have the problem the term is also used in engineering to mean deceleration, in music to resolve upward instead of downward, in many cases for its base meaning delay or impedance that is where the mental health meaning came from (which also included psychopathy in its broadest meaning). I have yet to see any sign engineers, mathematicians, musicians and bakers will budge on continuing to using the word.
you were using it to describe something that had nothing to do with suffering from a generalized disorder, ie using it as a pejorative for something stupid. as i pointed out, your example from "the corporation" is wrong- psychopathy is an adult behavioral disorder, not a form of developmental disability. they are separate categories with different diagnoses. and really i don't think capitalism is a mental disorder, but an economic one. your example about communism, etc misses the point. the people who deal most frequently with the developmentally disabled/delayed would like to see the word change and the scientific community is beginning to do so. you might as well be arguing to still use blumenbach's "varieties of mankind."
I was using it in its scientific form that is a generalized disorder, characterized by significantly impaired cognitive functioning. As I pointed out the film "The Corporation" made a similar comparison with capitalists just with a more specific type of the disability thus technically you can say all capitalists have the broader disability since they have the more specific disability. Or are we not allowed to talk about capitalism as a mental disorder, cause I bet you Marx would probably find that most amusing. As for name changes has attempts to change the word communism helped or to distance the word socialism for the USSR? Or how about the word working class? If we want to get around negative imagery of words by changing their name we'd have to change a lot of words.
science is gradually shifting away from the term, preferring "intellectual and developmental disability/delay," and outside of the scientific community the rejection of the term is more complete, as i pointed out to you earlier. furthermore you were not using the term as an accurate scientific designation of an intellectual or developmental disability, but in its colloquial, pejorative form. as for "changing names doesn't help," i'll just point you back to the african-american/nigger example. there's also the fact that the people most directly affected and involved would like to see the word changed, but i am sure you know better than them.
It is still scientific language it originated as a scientific term the pejorative meaning came later. Basically it is like wanting to change the word communism to something else because it developed a pejorative meaning. Changing names does not fix anything, ie a rose by any other name would be just as sweet.
