Sorry, guardians of sensitivity. You are not going to deprive us of the useful word “Crazy.” Or the other useful word “insane,” as applied to observed bad behavior.
Sensitivity to mental illness is a good thing, but we have all seen people act crazy or insane everyday, and when we say so it is not always actual medical diagnosis. At a certain commonsense point, we need to stop slicing this language into smaller and smaller and less articulate sections in order to avoid all possible offense to those who tirelessly patrol our conversations and our writing in search of issues with which they can demonstrate their own moral superiority.
I will not reduce myself to referring to the woman who screamed at the cashier for 20 minutes as rationally challenged or socially maladjusted or temporarily reality averse when what she was and what everybody on line saw her being was totally fucking crazy. My sensitivity toward people with genuine psychological issues will not make me tell that Birther that he’s insufficiently respectful toward evidence when I want to tell him that he is out of his bloody mind.
I have seen finger-wagging to the contrary a few times in the last day, including once from a woman Who Expressed how “Deeply disappointed” she was that somebody would use such language to describe a wildly abusive customer screaming at a teenager behind a fast food counter. Apparently what we are supposed to do when describing a situation like that is concoct a multi -syllabic hyphenate parsing the precise nature of the major malfunction.
You are not depriving me of crazy, stupid, maniacal, moronic, idiotic, dumb, wacky, lunatic, nuts, or any other profoundly useful words that come in so handy when I am forced to describe the bad behavior we see around us everyday. They are essential parts of my toolbox and you cannot have them. At a certain point you are simply sabotaging our ability to Communicate. And if you think less of me for drawing the line here, if this makes me a horrible person, or a relic of the last century, or any of the other bad things that make the Wranglers of our language sad, then so be it. At least people understand my sentences!
Comment By: James Cole
September 12th, 2015 at 4:17 pm
Thank you Adam.
Comment By: BrainiacV
September 12th, 2015 at 4:09 pm
I vote we keep “retarded” as well.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
September 13th, 2015 at 11:08 am
I am very much willing to give up the word “retarded” as a pejorative.
Comment By: Tina Connell
September 12th, 2015 at 5:52 pm
Stand up to irrelevant PC restrictions of your language. There have been far too many truncations of ‘permissible’ speech already. We will end up with a boring and stagnant language. And anyway, all of the words you cited are SO useful in describing our political process this year. Curmudgeons Rule!
Comment By: TR
September 14th, 2015 at 7:13 am
“I am very much willing to give up the word ‘retarded’ as a pejorative.”
That seems morally inconsistent. Why are those “guardians of sensitivity” worthy of your respect but not these others?
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
September 14th, 2015 at 8:15 am
I am large. I contain multitudes.
Comment By: TR
September 14th, 2015 at 11:55 am
I’m really asking.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
September 14th, 2015 at 12:11 pm
With the understanding then that I acknowledge a certain degree of inconsistency:
“Crazy” is something somebody can be without being clinically insane. Hell, “Insane” is something you can be without being clinically insane. Almost all of the adjectives that mean “stupid” can apply to people being willfully stupid, stupid because of stubbornness, stupid because they never ever bothered to apply thought to a problem.
“Retarded,” however, refers specifically to people who have some kind of functional damage through no fault of their own.
That neighbor down the street who watches me with binoculars, I have no problem with calling her a psycho and doing it derisively. I do, however, have a problem with calling somebody who has merely been some variety of fool “retarded.” I came to this via hard experience and a talk with a friend who is the loving father of a high-functioning young woman of limited mental acuity. I will not go so far as to say that the very phrase, “mentally retarded,” applied to him, is insulting, as some would say; however, I avoid telling the pal who just did something stupid, “You’re such a retard.” And if this is inconsistent with my resistance toward the disposal of all those helpful terms for those who have used their minds in deluded manners, such as in the last parenthetical phrase, then so be it. It is where I draw the line.
Comment By: Sean Crawford
September 22nd, 2015 at 7:12 pm
For decades now I’ve said mentally handicapped, in place of mentally retarded. Other terms could be developmentally delayed or person with a developmental disability.
Call me a typical computer/sf/nerd, but I have to admit, it was only rubbing shoulders with “differently abled folks” (joke) that got me doing humour and small talk. Unlike, say, that physicist on Big Bang Theory, my associates really appreciated me developing such skills.
Comment By: Roxane Farrell Murray
September 12th, 2016 at 9:18 am
I wonder why nobody ever gets offended by mealy-mouthed euphemisms.
Comment By: Allegra Sloman
September 12th, 2016 at 9:18 am
Difficult works for me.
Comment By: Robert Moriyama
September 12th, 2016 at 10:17 am
These days, people with diagnosed (or undiagnosed, but real) mental illnesses are upset when people call Donald Trump crazy, because who in or out of their “right” mind wants to be compared to him?
Comment By: Charles Mohapel
September 12th, 2016 at 12:19 pm
Was this “Guardian of Language” self-appointed or just delusional?
Comment By: Pawyigh Lee Montgomery
September 12th, 2016 at 4:18 pm
Crazed?
Comment By: Steve Dooner
September 13th, 2016 at 6:18 am
Still crazy after all these tears.