Evening.
We thought it might help to explain our position here a bit more.
OK, our Talk Guidelines, for some time now, have said that we will remove posts that contain words we consider to be disablist, once they are reported to us.
We amended our Talk Guidelines to include disablist terms, partly in response to recent disability discrimination legislation and partly in response to a rising swell of concern from those who regularly post in our Special Needs topics.
Our practice when a disablist term is reported to us is to delete it, as per our Guidelines. But when it seems clear to us that the person who used the term has not used it with any offensive intent, we tend to drop them a mail, explaining what's happened and saying we realise they probably didn't mean to break the rules.
In cases where the disablist term is actually in the OP and the thread is already running at several dozen posts, we occasionally decide to edit out the disablist term, to avoid having to delete the OP, render the thread pretty senseless and, potentially, make the OP herself feel she's been publicly hauled over the coals. Again, we drop the OP a mail, explaining what's happened and saying we don't do this often but we thought a quick edit would be preferable to making a big song and dance on the thread.
Obviously, in the case of this thread, that didn't pan out too well.
As for the terms we do consider disablist, as KateMNHQ has posted earlier in the thread, they would include retard, cretin, spaz, moron and mong. We included moron specifically because of its associations with the eugenics movement.
There are other terms, like idiot and lunatic, whose usage specifically to describe people with learning difficulties or mental-health conditions has long, long since past, and whose meaning has now widened to encompass something altogether more general and less offensive - and those we tend to leave.
But it's all a very fluid, grey area and we remain open to correction and clarification.