"Press twisted my words" Michael Kramer

[mamakim]

Thought as much

I agree entirely with the article and the point of it and all the wonderful breastfeeding stuff and I'm sure that he's a lovely man, and I know some phrases are in greater use on the other side of the Atlantic, but...

He actually said "mental retard"?

It was a in direct quote... I was a bit as well. Possibly it's a term which isn't considered offensive in Canada?

When I lived in Canada people did use that term in a way that made me . But not sure if I knew a representative sample. Maybe there are Canadians who find it as offensive as we do?

In the US and Canada that phrase is more colloquial than derogatory. Another one (begins with S)t is offensive in the UK but likewise seen as colloquial over there.

Yes I'd heard that too - of course, it used to be OK in the UK as well - or at least one assumes so, given Scope's former name...

Mental Retardation is the term in current use in the US for Learning Disability (there learning disability means dyslexia etc).

I do literature searches on learning disability topics for my work and was quite shocked to come across it as the Subject Heading in use in the literature but it's the current and accepted descriptive term there for impaired intellectual and adaptive functioning.

I still think there's a big difference between saying that someone is "affected by mental retardation", or even saying that someone is "mentally retarded" (I regularly read a blog by a US woman who occasionally refers to her clearly much-loved brother, who has some form of congenital learning disability, as her "retarded brother") so that doesn't cause me as much shock as it once did, at least when it comes from a North American source) and calling someone "a mental retard", though.

I suppose it just came as a huge shock in the middle of an interesting article on breastfeeding.

Yes it brought me up short as well. And by co-incidence, I saw this on Slate this morning - so obviously people in the US are having a bit of a rethink too....