to expect my well educated friends to realise the derogatory nature of their language?

[auntyspan]

i have a very dear friend who I have known for years. Last week she described someone (some hoodlum in Asda) as a 'mong'. I was utterly shocked that someone so educated and cultured as her could use such a term.

I discussed it with my DH and he said there was a couple of blokes in his office that used the term too - and suggested I might be a little over sensitive as my nephew has Downs Syndrome.

AIBU to expect this term to have died last century?

Sorry, my last post was to Vacua

LOL at Nelson Mandela being 'African-American'

He just didn't have any other polite term!

I wonder exactly the same thing - will they look back and shudder at the chemicals pumped into brains, but if you have to have a mental illness better now than even 50 years ago I reckon

I know it's clumsy to say 'person with schizophrenia' but it is a bit better than 'schizophrenic' because it just highlights the fact that the person is a person first. I don't think it's the same for diabetes or asthma because the terms don't carry such negative connotations. Language is important.

That's why neurolinguistic programming works - the words we use affect the way we view the thing itself. And a person who happens to have a disability is different from a disabled person, who is only a person second...

I understand waht you mean MIS (well, sort of)but don't many of us use adjectives of some kind - young, old etc. We all label other people in some way or another.

True Mercy, I guess if you carried it to the logical limit we'd talk about a "person who is old" rather than "an old person". Or maybe there's some polite version where you don't even use "old"...

but everybody gets old, and everybody has been young - it depends how you use it doesn't it? the thing with disabilities or mental distress is that the labels can be stigmatising, laws have been passed because discrimination was so widespread and still is really

people do discriminate the elderly and the young in different ways I suppose, nobody is immune from prejudice - it's just the scale of it

discriminate against . . . gah

Isn't the word 'retard' used in the states to describe a disabled person? It is an awful word as are the rest of the words mentioned.

yes, I agree. Certain words have certain meanings only for some people .

Lots of people use 'shorthand' without meaning to be offensive or derogatory though.

I thought 'senior' was the new 'old'

Or maybe silver

I work with people with disabilities so I tend to be aware of developments in language in this area but a lot of ordinary people are genuinely unaware that words they were brought up with are no longer acceptable. It doesn't mean they shouldn't be corrected - I agree with what AMumInScotland says about the words we use affecting how we think about something or someone - but it does influence how one should handle it.

I will, though, continue to use the term "disabled people" where "people with disabilities" would be too cumbersome. It can be taken too far. "Differently abled" is just hideous.

I think the term "Disabled" is the only respectful term. The rest mentioned are hideous.

I really hate the word disablist. Why make up a word.

I was pushing my son in his wheelchair, through town when some one stopped me asking for funds for disablist activites. WTF

TBH I also think the context will show whether it is their attitude or just a word that is the problem - if someone said "all people with disabilities are ...(insert unpleasant term here)", then the fact they had used the currently acceptable term wouldn't make any difference! Equally "we've sorted out access to our office because a disabled person will be starting work there on Monday" is clearly not intended to be negative.

Violetsky - you should have asked them for a divvy!

And then wait until you have teenagers around and all their slang which is very hard to follow

( I assume divvy isn't just Scottish - if so, it means your share of something)

Auntyspan I am shocked at your friend saying that and too.You are not being over sensitive and even if you were so what!You are not being unreasonable.

Ah yes Xenia, nearly everything is "random" apparently these days...

I just read this month's Tatler tonight and there's a list of new teenage words in there too many of which I hadn't heard although my oldest 3 are virtually not teenagers now so probably even they aren't up to date nowadays. I did find some of the very rough joshing banter between my son and his teenage friends and the insults they called each other from old woman to gay (as if that were an insult at all) a bit much but they all just seemed to treat it like water off a duck's back.

AMumInScotland, no pet I didn't ask for a divvy, as I was still shocked upon the learning of a new word.; (divvy doesn't always mean a share ... it used to mean (vs whispers) thick.)

Not everyone knows the history/derivations of words they are used to hearing and using, and this is particularly the case with insults. When I was a teenager, a very common insult was 'flid', a owrd used to men 'stupid/incompetent/out-of-favour person' which I later found out was a contraction of 'thalidomide', therefore not a term to use among civilised people. I also had some Australian friends who quite freely used the term 'wogboy' which does not, in Australia, have the same viciously racist connotations as it does in the UK - I explained to them that it was not an acceptable word to most people in the UK, and why it was not acceptable, and they stopped using it.