popular thinking

BOSTON SLANGUAGE

People around here talk funny. That's true. They also tend to fall back on certain go-to words. Wicked is one. Retarded, er, um, retahded, is another. So with the debut of The Ringer this past weekend, what better time to examine the Bostonian lingo.

‘Ringer’ got it right: Experts decry (mis)use of ‘retarded’ (Boston Herald)
In the new comedy The Ringer, Johnny Knoxville’s character learns to love the Special Olympics, yelling at his uncle, saying he never wants to hear him say the words “retarded” or “tard” ever again.
He might succeed on film.
But could he persuade Bostonians, who say “retahded” in casual conversation without hesitation, to change their slang?
“People use it in a disparaging way,” said Leo Sarkissian, executive director of The ARC of Massachusetts.
“We took it out of our name,” Sarkissian said. The group goes by ARC specifically to avoid saying the word (although it’s part of the acronym Association of Retarded Citizens).
“When we do hear it in music, when we hear it in other places, it does feel like we’re being made fun of,” he said.
In 2004, the Black Eyed Peas had a dance-floor hit with “Let’s Get Retarded,” although the song landed on radio and in NBA promotions as “Let’s Get It Started.” (In multiple concerts here this year, though, the band performed the “retarded” version of the song.)
A recurring skit on “Saturday Night Live” featured Jimmy Fallon and Lexington’s Rachel Dratch as Boston teens, repeatedly telling each other, “You’re retahded.”
And The Boston Globe thought the word so vital to Boston slang that it included it in three separate stories — in its special section for last year’s Democratic National Convention, in a 1997 “student survival guide” and in a 1995 magazine piece on Boston-speak.
Online, the Urban Dictionary has dozens of entries for the word, with submissions defining it in mostly negative, sometimes highly specific terms (one entry reads: “George W. Bush is a retard”).
Dave Lenox, a Special Olympics vice president who served as technical adviser on set of The Ringer, knows as well as anyone how frequently the word gets bandied about.
“I’ve got a son who is 13 and a daughter who is 10, so we hear the word all the time,” he said.
“If I were to ask my son’s friends, ‘What did you mean by that?’ They’d say it’s just a way of putting someone down.”
Lenox said adolescents may think of the slam as just another adjective, without realizing “they’re unwittingly harming a population.”
Changing the language comes down to changing attitudes.
“The only way that’s going to stop is when people feel like they personally know someone who has mental retardation,” Lenox said. “It has to hit you where you live. That’s not a lesson kids are going to get. ‘Oh, don’t say that? Well, I’ll just say it more.’ It really needs to impact them.”
Does derogatory use of “retarded” match that of “gay”?
Lenox, who is gay, thinks so.
“They run right up there together,” he said. “In populations that have been marginalized, whether it’s women, blacks, gays, even people after World War II who had German surnames, the key to them getting respect was them owning up to it and taking charge of their names. . . . That’s what people with mental retardation need to do. Yes, we are (retarded). Now move on.”
As for Lenox, he doesn’t describe things he dislikes as either “retarded” or “gay.”
“I will say, ‘Oh, that was stupid,’ or ‘That was moronic,’ or ‘asinine,’ ” he said. “I don’t do it because it’s the politically correct thing to do.”
Promoting political correctness won’t persuade anyone to alter their boorish behavior. Both Lenox and Sarkissian agree that promoting people with intellectual disabilities as people might help.
“We don’t have too many words to replace it with,” Sarkissian said. “We often say, ‘Try to think of people first. Don’t think of the label.’ A movie like this might go a long way toward educating people.”

UPDATE: I've included comments I received this week from a BU professor in a new posting on Dec. 30