John McGinley (Scrubs)

HellsKitchenmanNYC

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I heard an interesting interview w/him one day. He has a special needs son and is trying to get people to stop using the word retarded...even as a joke aboout someone. I guess it's the next in line for becoming an un-PC word.
 

waterpoloplaya

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Yeah one of my best friends and I are now working for special olympics and have developed a ban the R word campaign. Side note: I'm a huge scrubs fan and dr. cox could dominate me anyday
 
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I heard an interesting interview w/him one day. He has a special needs son and is trying to get people to stop using the word retarded...even as a joke aboout someone. I guess it's the next in line for becoming an un-PC word.

It's been un-PC for a while now. The problem is, even professionals within the fields can't agree on the proper terminology. Some people prefer alternative terms such as "intellectual disability," but I was recently facilitating a committee that reviews educational materials for fairness and freedom from bias, and they raised the question whether or not the term "disability" is acceptable. Some people don't like it, but within the field of special education, terms like "learning disabled," "emotional disability," and "visually impaired" or "hearing impaired" are still used all the time. The term "mental retardation" is still widely used within the field, but at the same time, it's not really polite to refer to someone as "retarded." You can, however, talk about someone "with mental retardation."

Here's a relevant example of the "euphamism treadmill" from wikipedia:

lame → crippled → handicapped → disabled → physically challenged → differently abled

Euphemism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia