The problem isn't the intent of the speaker. The problem is that the words themselves carry an intrinsic charge; they create an outsized potential for negative thoughts and impressions in the listener regardless of intent. There are neutral, more purely descriptive words that equally easy to use in conversations, and so it makes sense to push the negatively charged terms out.
Fashions will change, but Paul Graham is accidentally creating the impression that fashion is purely random. It is not. The word "retard" as a reference for the mentally handicapped is not going to come back into fashion; it has been obsoleted by a better understanding of both the processes of mental and developmental disability and of the role of the mentally handicapped in society.
Which is all for the better, because the verb "retard" is useful, and it would be great if fashion made it less clumsy sounding in normal speech.
There is a kids TV show here in the UK called Blue Peter, it's been running for decades. I'm not sure who Blue Peter actually was (the show is presented by a man, and woman, a cat and a dog) but anyone British will have watched it regularly growing up.
One day back in the 80s Blue Peter decided it was going to do something about discrimination against what were then known as "spastics" (I will use the term as it is historically correct). So they got someone on called Joey Deacon (see, I can still remember the name) to show that they were just normal people despite their physical condition.
It backfired spectacularly. The next day in the playground, "Joey" was the insult of choice. Now this may just be because kids are stupid and cruel but there is a lesson there: you can't do social engineering by clumsy attempts to manipulate language. It just doesn't work. So (for example) nowadays when we hear that a kid has ADHD, everyone just rolls their eyes and knows perfectly well that is just the PC way to say "bad parenting".
I have no idea how to parse this comment. Calling someone a "spastic" seems horrible. Kids in schoolyards looking to score points at the expense of the disabled are horrible. Assuming that a kid with ADHD is the victim of bad parenting seems like a terrible idea. Following your idea to its logical conclusion, it seems like we'd still be calling black people the n-word; after all, much of the use of that word in the first half of the 20th century was probably intended to be neutral.
It seems horrible now but it was the normal term at the time; even the charity was called the Spastics Society. And you only have that reaction because you've bought into the PC game.
But my point is, PC doesn't really work. Everyone "knows" what is really meant by any of the PC terms.
The problem is that the words themselves carry an intrinsic charge
I'd say that is precisely what they don't do. That's magical thinking (what sort of energy is this "charge"?) and I think it's the core of what's wrong with political correctness: people imagine that they're fixing reality by doing surgery on language, but they're not; they're fixing a reflection of reality, with "fixing" in the sense of "price-fixing". In other words it's photoshopping.
That's why intent matters: it actually exists, while the intrinsic power of bad words does not. Ignore intent and you end up in an absurd place.
In extreme cases this leads to personal harm being caused, but those are pretty rare. What bugs me more is how rigid people get when they try to correct others. That special blend of prissiness and condemnation is an anti-peanut-butter-cup, and it just makes me want to say "jehovah" over and over again like the dude in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_hlMK7tCks.
It also misses how language really works. Language changes as people change. We can't control it, and it's silly to pretend that we can. That's like King Canute who ordered the waves to stop (except Canute's whole point was that they wouldn't comply, even for a king).
The truth about all this is told by the great comedians who mine the contradictions between language and social norms. Is there one piece of great comedy defending the politically correct view of language? I'd love to see it.
p.s. Just to be clear, I don't mean that you try to censor other people—I've never noticed anything of the sort. It's clear that your interest in this topic is in wanting not to hurt others with words inadvertently. That's totally distinct from the language-police impulse and I admire it. But I disagree with your model, I think.
The notion that words are charged isn't magical thinking. It's simple semantics. Some words have more than one meaning. Sometimes one of those meanings is sharply negative. Usage can be ambiguous. The use of such a negatively-charged word (see: n-word, f-word, r-word) carries a risk that listeners will infer an unintended meaning. That risk is often inconvenient for a well-intentioned speaker, and simultaneously convenient to some privileged or partisan group.
And words obviously have the power to frame issues. An inheritance tax is a sensible measure that increases government revenues at the point where money has its lowest marginal value to its owner, while also serving as a check on dynastic wealth. A death tax is an outrageous injustice by an overreaching government that surely seeks next to tax breathable air.
I think this seems dumb because you're intent on looking at attitude and language as a discrete causal relationship. But it's not; it's continuous and reciprocal. Some people condemn racism. The n-word is gradually shunned. The shunning of the word becomes another vector for the idea that racism should be condemned.
Surely, there are people who would like skip the "people change" step, and proceed directly to policing our consciousness through control of the language. But I'm always struck in articles like this one how silly the motivating examples are; a student with a complaint about the word "niggardly" in Chaucer? Come on, that's small-ball compared to institutional racism. Which, if you made it that far into this article, is the reason USDA had a (silly, I agree) $200k seminar with a speaker asking the audience to say "The Pilgrims Were The Original Illegal Aliens": USDA had, believe it or not, been an epicenter for modern institutional racism, recently forced to pay out almost $2bn in settlements to black farmers who had been denied aid.
Surely, you're not militating for the return of the word "retard". Are you sure we really disagree?
I'm not here to to argue that there's no such thing as "political correctness" --- though I dislike that term, which appears in modern usage to mostly be a tool for defending privilege. But all I chimed in here to say was that linguistic fashion isn't random.
I'm not understanding everything here, but I agree that my post was simplistic to say that language is just a reflection of reality. It's more complex than that. I thought that when I wrote it, too, but didn't go there because it doesn't change my point and because I'm unsure how much precision I'm capable of.
Words condition our thoughts and feelings and behavior. So it's not just that people-change causes language-change; there's a feedback loop. But it's not a feedback loop we can control with anything as heavy-handed as ideology. To attempt to intervene that way is exceedingly crude. That's why it's associated with rigid thinking and pushy behavior.
In its milder forms that intervention is nannyism; in its more virulent forms it turns into persecution. Is it as evil as racism itself? The question seems ridiculous. If I have to answer, the answer is "obviously not", but really that whole line of thinking is a distraction. I don't accept that a repressive attitude towards language is of the least value in correcting injustice.
I could go on about this indefinitely so perhaps I'll stop here.
I suppose I would disagree: that the fashions are random, or largely so. "retard: to slow": yet "mentally retarded" changes to "mentally handicapped" to "mentally disabled".
Going strictly by the original definitions, I'm just not seeing the better accuracy of the later terms.
As a counter example, I applaud the gay community for putting the brakes on the politically-correct-damning of the word "gay" which was on it's way to becoming an 'offensive' term. I suppose some still things it is, and of course some teenagers still use it with ill intent, but I think most agree that it's not 'bad' when used in a 'proper' manner.
It is not obsoleted because we better understand mental health. It is obsoleted because being mentally unhealthy is commonly regarded as bad, and it becomes to be used as pejorative term having no relation with actual illness. This, of course, annoys those who notice now actual mentally ill people are associated with something bad, through no fault of their own, and that's not nice. So they invent a term that is "pure" and detached from the bad meaning. Which in a short while again enters into use as a pejorative, and the euphemism treadmill continues to roll. It has nothing to do with better understanding.
Of course, there's another way - making the euphemism so clunky and unnatural that nobody outside of professional context would be willing to use it. Thus things like "differently abled".
From my time in paediatric neurology a decade ago, 'retarded' has been replaced with 'developmentally delayed'. I have yet to see that enter into use as a pejorative, and frankly there are too many syllables for it to do so. It's not unnatural, not a euphamism, and is an apolitical description of what's happening: we haven't determined a specific issue with the child, but the child is not hitting the developmental milestones one would expect for the age.
I'd also strongly contest the 'nothing to do with better understanding', given that we now have multiple ways to classify mental issues, where previously they were all lumped into huge, overbroad groups.
Isn't "developmentally delayed" lumping everybody who didn't hit the certain set of milestones into one huge, overbroad groups? For one, some of them may be "delayed" - i.e. they may catch up with these milestones later, but some, unfortunately, would never reach them, in which case "delayed" is plainly misleading. Is is a wrong definition or feel-good term that is incorrect in fact?
Edit: I guess I should elaborate. Developmental delay is an indicator of a problem. It's not meant to be a final diagnosis - where possible, a reason for the delay is sought out. 'Developmental delay', like 'mentally retarded' is a symptom - it's just in olden days it was left there; the root cause was rarely sought.
Yes, the term can be misleading, and I don't like it for that reason. But it's not 'feel-good' nor incorrect in fact. It's an accurate description of what is happening.
Fashions will change, but Paul Graham is accidentally creating the impression that fashion is purely random. It is not. The word "retard" as a reference for the mentally handicapped is not going to come back into fashion; it has been obsoleted by a better understanding of both the processes of mental and developmental disability and of the role of the mentally handicapped in society.
Which is all for the better, because the verb "retard" is useful, and it would be great if fashion made it less clumsy sounding in normal speech.