Retarded?
Did people use that word in the 80s?
shareYes, that word brought me up short, too. I don't remember people using it then in that particular way.
share
MovieChat Forums > Is Anybody There? (2009) Discussion > Retarded?
I'm sure it was used quite frequently. It was only 20-odd years ago, not pre-electricity! People also used the word "spastic" to mean the same thing, which was equally insulting and misleading. Why, do you think that people are only rude and politically incorrect in the noughties? It's been going on for a lot longer than that . . .
"You people. If there isn't a movie about it, it's not worth knowing about, is it" - Dogma
Did I imply that, in any way?
There were other linguistic anomalies, too. I'm sure 'It was ace' and 'It was wicked' were not used by the young in the 80s.
actually they were, i used ace alot and I knew a fair few who used wicked (the latter was more of a down south thing)
share"Ace" for sure, that was in use as far back as the early 70's. "Retarded" probably not - it's arrived from America more recently I think. "Wicked" is a bit borderline - maybe in London but not in the North where the film seemed to be set. The period details in general did seem a bit shaky to me - I thought we were in the 70's until I saw the care assistant's puffy skirt, although I suppose the parents were intended to look a bit behind-the-times.
I used to want to change the world. Now I just want to leave the room with a little dignity.
they are british. they are not as rediculs about languige as americans
i mean they use the big C word with out blinking there eye.. here.. man.. u say that and your in a lode of the big S word
the joker ate frank bunny!
Soul singer Wilson Pickett's nickname in the mid 1960s was "The Wicked Pickett", and it meant he was cool, not wicked.
shareHaving grown up in the Midwest in the 80s with a cousing who has Downs I can say for certain that "retarded" was used a lot. I was overly sensitive to it I guess. Ace seemed very 1950s/1960s, sort of Stand By Me ish, as for Wicked, yeah, that was a Valley Girl kind of thing, 1980s.
*** I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "I drank what?" ***
Did people use that word in the 80s?Not just in 80s but long before. Mental retardation is an official medical/psychological term, and has been for a long time.
My name is Colin Creevey
and I'm a photoholic. share
yes, but was it slang in England at the time?
Dave turned me loose in Bergdorf's and I went mad.
As I was never in England, I do not know.
My name is Colin Creevey
and I'm a photoholic.
In the UK "Retarded" goes back a very long way as a factual, and not deliberately unkind, description but by the 1980s, very like "spastic" or "crippled" it had come to be regarded as insulting and had dropped out of fashion. "Retarded" as it was used in the film really didn't come back as a general insult until the 90's, after it became common in the US.
Its use in the modern sense seemed like an anachronism to me.
Also very anachronistic was the mothers' suspicion of the old man waiting for the boy at the school gates. There really wasn't that sort of immediate suspicion at all in the 1980s.
"Retarded" goes back a very long way as a factual, and not deliberately unkind, description but by the 1980s, very like "spastic" or "crippled" it had come to be regarded as insulting and had dropped out of fashion. "Retarded" as it was used in the film really didn't come back as a general insult until the 90's, after it became common in the US.
That's exactly how I remember the 80s. There was a mentally retarded kid on my street, and we used the word "retarded" to describe him but never as an insult. It was used exactly the way "mentally challenged" is used today. The first time I heard "retarded" used as slang, outside the medical definition, was on Saturday Night Live in the late 90s. share
I don't remember saying it at school back then as well.
I think they still used to say gay like what they do now though?.
I don't know about England but it was used as an insult as far back as the 70s. I don't think it ever fell out of style for people who didn't care about being politically correct or hurting somebody's feelings. I heard people use it all the time. So yeah it was used in the 80s by anybody who cared to use it.
"What happens to a dream deferred?"
But the film was set in England. What we are saying is that, regardless of usage in the rest of the world at the time, "retarded" wasn't used as an insult in the way it was in the film in England.
share