Hello again
Right - obviously there are some issues here (and I should hold my hands up and confess that it was me who suggested to zzzzz that she start a thread about disablist language). It is something we at MNHQ have been planning to have a discussion with posters about for some time. We're really really sorry if you felt under pressure to do this zzzzz - our bad. We will try to bring it up in the site webchat on Friday and see if we can open up the issue then.
In all honesty, there are times when we feel genuinely unsure about what to do. In the case of the use of 'speckle' (quoted above), you can see the post here. To us, it looks like a poster quoting a word that her own child uses to refer to herself. (To add to the confusion, to the best of our knowledge it's a neologism - ie, a completely new word that doesn't as yet have any particular implications beyond those that each person reading it chooses to bring to it.)
So on thoses bases - it's a made-up word, and a word that a bona fide MNer says her own child uses about herself - we decided to let it stand.
We're honestly interested to know how you'd have us handle things like this. We don't claim to always get it right, as you know. But (as we said to zzzzz in our message to her), we're mindful of the fact that as well as trying to protect our users from having to read outright disablist terms, we're also (at MNHQ) trying to bring along with us a community of thousands and thousands of posters, many of whom will never even have heard of the term 'disablist'. And one of the things we need to consider is whether an approach that deleted absolutely every complained-of term - every variation of 'special' for instance, or every use of 'special' in quotation marks - would actually end up alienating many of the people we're trying to bring along with us.
But as ever, we're genuinely interested to know what you think.