The resurgence of the r-word

Around 15 years ago, a new campaign took off across the young social media ecosystem. 

People with learning disabilities and intellectual disorders were asking everyone else to stop using the r-word to describe them or even to make jokes. No more, “Bro, that movie’s so dumb, it’s [r-word],” no more, “Don’t be stupid, why are you acting like such a [r-word]?” 

Across the internet, commentators had their doubts that the movement would succeed, or even that it was worthwhile.

Surely, detractors argued, we had seen this dance before, with words like “idiot” and “moron” and “stupid.” All of them were originally developed as clinical terms for people with intellectual disorders, and they all eventually became insults as the wider public picked up on them, in a process variously called the euphemism cycle or the euphemism treadmill. “Idiot” and its ilk emerged in an era that lacked our current moment’s sensitivity over slurs, so they hadn’t experienced the same boycott campaign that the r-word was facing. 

Even if the r-word was banished, wouldn’t new pejoratives simply replace it? “If interest groups want to pour resources into cleaning up unintentional insults, more power to them,” allowed a Washington Post column in 2010. “But we must not let ‘retard’ go without a requiem. If the goal is to protect intellectually disabled individuals from put-downs and prejudice, it won’t succeed. New words of insult will replace old ones.” 

Yet apparently against the odds, the campaign worked. Over the past decade, bit by bit, the r-word more or less vanished. (To a certain extent, though, the expected also occurred, as other euphemisms did in fact emerge. Donald Trump has lately taken to contending, just on the edge of a slur, that he thinks Kamala Harris might be “mentally disabled.”) 

Until the past year or so, that is, when the r-word appeared to be trending back up. 

Posts using the word have racked up tens of thousands of likes, bookmarks, and reposts on X in the last year. Edgelord comedians have started to use the word in their sets. “I know I said ‘retarded’ there a couple times. My bad on that,” said comic Shane Gillis in a recent set as he introduced a joke about his uncle’s Down Syndrome. On FX’s new sitcom The English Teacher, teachers muse about how “the kids are not into being woke” anymore and “they’re saying the r-word again.” It’s become a bipartisan slur, available to anyone on the right or the left or in between who wants to show off their iconoclasm.  

“This summer I started hearing it right after the Democratic convention,” says Katy Neas, CEO at The Arc, a disability rights advocacy group. “Governor Walz’s son [who has neurodivergence] appeared, and I saw people being comfortable in using it on social media.”

Andrea Cahn, vice president at Special Olympics Unified Champion Schools who helped lead the 2009 campaign against the r-word, says she’s seen steadily increasing attention to the old parts of the Special Olympics website that used to promote their anti r-word campaigns. “Last year, people started asking for it because they were saying that they needed to reconnect with that messaging,” says Cahn. “So we promoted those pages, and traffic to the website went up by 200 or 300 percent or something like that.”

It’s hard to say for sure that usage of the r-word is increasing. The use of swear words across time is notoriously hard to track. But it does at the very least look as though for some demographics, the r-word has become trendy in a way that it wasn’t a few short years ago. 

Here’s how the r-word fell out of usage and why it seems to be coming back now.

Running on the euphemism treadmill

One of the ways you can tell when a group is particularly marginalized is that the words we use to describe them come to seem humiliating and dehumanizing, even when they’re not intended to be. We can track this process very neatly when it comes to people with intellectual disabilities by observing the name changes of a group now known as the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD). 

When the AAIDD was founded in 1876, its name was the Association of Medical Officers of American Institutions for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Persons. In 1910, it became the American Association for the Study of the Feebleminded. By 1933, it was the American Association on Mental Deficiency. In 1957, the American Association on Mental Retardation. Finally, in 2007, it became the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. 

“Idiot” and “feeble-minded” were legitimate medical diagnoses in their day. So, too, was “mentally retarded.” Over time, though, they all became words that laypeople were happy to throw around as insults, which in turn meant that as medical terminology, they came to feel humiliating to the people they were supposed to help. In order to do their work, the words had to shift. 

This kind of shifting of meaning was called the euphemism cycle by linguist Sharon Henderson Taylor in 1974, and later renamed the euphemism treadmill by psycholinguist Stephen Pinker in 1994. “Euphemisms denoting low intelligence seem particularly susceptible to the sort of pejoration that the word ‘retarded’ is undergoing,” observed Taylor in her paper “Terms for Low Intelligence.” 

The r-word started to fall out of official usage in the last decades of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st. In 2010, Barack Obama signed into effect Rosa’s Law, which removed the words “mental retardation” from federal law and replaced them with the words “intellectual disability” or “intellectual disabilities.” Multiple states followed suit.

As the r-word faded out of official language, activists began to turn their attention to more casual use. Cahn says the 2007 film Tropic Thunder, which prominently features a joke about actors “going full retard,” was a major impetus for Special Olympics to launch their “Spread the Word to End the Word” campaign to eradicate the r-word once and for all.

 “We had some youth advocates that were really vocal about the harm and the insult that it was — people with intellectual disabilities, athletes of Special Olympics, and a lot of our young people that were involved in Unified Sports in schools,” says Cahn. “We had a fairly concerted campaign around Tropic Thunder, and that really galvanized our population.” 

By 2018, so many students had signed a pledge not to use the r-word as part of “Spread the Word” that the campaign was basically over. “Our school participants were asking, ‘What’s next?’” says Cahn. The Special Olympics team decided to expand to “focus on a larger, broader inclusion message” focused less on teaching kids about the r-word specifically. After all, they already knew.

Or, at least, they used to. 

How the r-word came back

It’s hard to say why the r-word is suddenly so much more visible now than it was a few years ago.

One reason might be that influencers have far more reach now, and they experience less incentive to avoid insulting parts of their audience than traditional celebrities. 

 “Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the more traditional celebrity is more aware of the feedback or more concerned about a feedback loop that could happen,” Cahn says. “Whereas, for the more individual influencer, they have less at stake when being outrageous.”

Indeed, for some online personalities, being outrageous is the whole point. Linguist Caitlin Green points out that the r-word has become a convenient marker of edgy identity among conservatives online. 

“What you’re doing when you use a slur is you’re telling the people in your audience, ‘This is the kind of person I am, and this is the kind of attitude I have toward the normies that don’t use that word,’” says Green. “You get the right-wingers using it because they’re anti-woke and not using the slur is local, right?” 

Linguist Christopher Hom notes that the heroes of the online right are those with the loudest voices when it comes to mocking those with disabilities, if not outright using the r-word. Trump infamously mocked journalists with disabilities twice in 2015 during his successful campaign for the presidency. “That really sends a signal about what’s acceptable and about how our social norms can change,” says Hom. 

Meanwhile, Elon Musk, who has publicly used the r-word to taunt his critics online, has chosen to remove the old Twitter safeguards against hate speech since he purchased the site in 2022. Under Musk’s reign, the r-word has been free to spread and flourish on what is now known as X. 

“It creates this cycle where you see that the word is allowed, so then others feel like they can use it,” says Hom.

The r-word seems to be particularly appealing for Musk and others in the Silicon Valley right who are preoccupied with racist pseudoscience around whether some races have higher IQs than others. 

“That ideology is pretty closely connected with the tendency to go for a mental disability over another kind of slur,” says Green. If a central part of your worldview is the reprehensible idea that some races are physically and mentally superior, ableism becomes especially important: You prove that one race is better than another by making the claim that it’s less likely to experience disabilities and that people who experience disabilities are less than human. 

The r-word can also be attractive to people who identify as leftists and want to make a point that they’re cooler than mainstream liberals. “A lot of them are trying to claim this position that’s actually kind of a balancing act to maintain,” says Green, “which is ‘Yes, I’m on the left, but I’m not one of those crazy, screechy lefty people. I’m cool. I’m willing to use slurs.’”

The resurgence of the r-word could also be seen as a sign that mainstream culture has gotten less censorious in the post-pandemic 2020s than it was during the more progressive 2010s. “People are just being less sensitive,” said one poster on Reddit during a conversation earlier this year about why the r-word has returned. “For most of the 2010’s the attitude was not offending anybody and walking on eggshells. Now it seems to be shifting to ‘Just don’t be an asshole and if you are here’s the hardline’ and the word ‘Retard’ isn’t on that line.”

Why people think ableism is just not that bad 

Ableism is frequently the prejudice that doesn’t quite make it to the hardline. “Ableism is an easy one to ridicule as a concept,” says Green. “We have these discourses that come up every once in a while on social media, where someone will be like, ‘Telling me not to use DoorDash is ableist,’ or like, ‘Telling me I have to smile when I’m at my customer service job is ableist.’ And then everybody piles on them, and they’re like, ‘Oh my god, these online woke people, they’re out of control.’” 

“Ableism is the vector” that leads to stern think pieces about how wokeness has gone too far, Green adds.

People may overlook the discrimination disabled people face if they compare it to other prejudices that run rampant in the US. Hom cites the FBI’s hate crime report, which shows 28 incidents of violence against those with mental disabilities over the past year, as opposed to over 1,000 incidents against Black people and Jewish people combined. But violent crime against people with disabilities is still disproportionately high, and in 2021, the Department of Justice reported that it was rising.

“But if you look at the other factors,” Hom continues, “the kind of boring factors that are really significant about quality of life, the ability to have a dignified life, to be able to have self-determination, it’s really bad actually. The numbers are quite shocking.”

People with intellectual disabilities live 12 years less than other adults on average. For those with Down Syndrome, it’s 18 years less, and for those with cerebral palsy, it’s 23 years less. People with intellectual disabilities are more likely to develop chronic health conditions and to die of Covid-19. During the height of the pandemic, some states adopted the policy that ventilators should be preferentially saved for those without disabilities. 

To state plainly a thing most people sort of already know: Our society is not set up well for people with disabilities. It is very difficult and very expensive to live a good life as a disabled person in the US. Despite those facts, it seems to be very easy for many people to think of ableism as the kind of prejudice that doesn’t really count and the r-word as not a real slur. 

Jason Rogers, 32, has been involved in Special Olympics for years. As a teenager, he competed in swimming, which he says is his all-time favorite sport, and also practiced track and field. 

Today, Rogers is the coordinator of workplace readiness and inclusion on the leadership and organizational development team at Special Olympics International. He’s also community liaison for the Down Syndrome Community of Greater Chattanooga. Last summer, a stranger called him the r-word at a memorial service for a recently deceased family member.

“Think before you say something,” says Rogers. “Don’t say something you regret. We take the r-word very seriously in the Down community.”

Despite this seriousness, the r-word’s defenders protest that replacing it will be useless and that a new slur is certain to come along before too long. It’s a popular position to take. It’s popular even though the reason we keep having to replace medical terminology for people with intellectual disabilities is because we transfigure those words into a deeply humiliating insult, and we do that because our society is designed to treat people with disabilities with contempt.

“Ableism is what is fueling the euphemistic treadmill,” says Hom. “I take this as evidence that ableism really is pretty significant in our culture.”