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Has retard really hit this level of the euphemism treadmill that it is included on this list? Besides the dead naming and stalking I could have produced anecdotes for that whole list for myself and many people I knew growing up and none of us even considered ourselves that bullied. Discipline the little shits doing it for sure, they need to learn what is unacceptable but am I really supposed to be that surprised middle schoolers are little bastards to each other? I suppose if these are tasteful understatements that might be different but that doesn't seem their style.
I'm not sure. It was widely suspected to have been either on the No No List or used as justification for putting subs on the No No List back at reddit, but it wasn't the sort of thing that was getting autofiltered everywhere. In this case, it's a middle school student sending an e-mail to a teacher teacher, so I can understand not being in a huge hurry to spell it out (though the student did write out "faggot", which I was under the impressive was pretty discouraged).
I'm not sure for the 'stalking': the original allegation from the student was "[redacted] that kept asking if I would go out with him or [redacted] because they "had a crush on me" even after I kept telling them I was uncomfortable and asked them to stop". It might have been a genuine-if-creepy romantic overture, in which case it'd be outlier stalking, but I'd had something similar happen that was essentially just trolling, . Given the gender stuff, age group, and especially the dual overture, that seems at least as plausible for me.
That said, while I got to run into some really annoying bullying, I don't think anyone ever said even jokingly "I'm going to rape you". The closest was a girl who kept wagging me across the room and then making jokes about how she 'made me come with her finger', which is... still a pretty far distance away. And my high school days were back when that was much more in the common comedy than now.
Yeah, I'm absolutely not surprised by a bunch of young teenagers being jerks; even well-intentioned teens often don't recognize boundaries or reasonable behaviors, and a lot of kids aren't well-intentioned. I think the kids need to be talked to, but the bigger issue's the failures by the teachers in question. Even in informal environments, you have to be really careful because it's so easy for problems to fall through the cracks until they explode. If you can't separate the situations where a kid misbehaves until told proper behavior, from those where the kid continues to repeat or escalate bad acts, you don't have the ability to manage students at all.
Guys say this all the time, in different, often grotesquely violent terminology. "I'll rip out your eyes and skullfuck you into the next county!", which in a school document would probably get pared down to "I'll [rape] you". Especially if the person doing the writing wanted to make it seem more serious, rather than just over-the-top ridiculousness.
Didn't get that one, either. Especially at the time and the circles I wandered, there were only so many times you could offer or threaten to (skull)fuck a suspected gay before the 'suspected' bit would have rubbed onto the jokester too, so may have been more present for other people.
I'll certainly recognize the possibility it was a joke or even a friendly joke, and the timeframe would be about right for when the whole 'submissive and breedable' meme took off (which, uh... is even more awkward to write out). And, to be clear, there's a lot of not-joking interpretations that would still require little and minimal immediate intervention. At the other extreme, it's certainly possible that Student 1's specific allegation (to directly quote the e-mail: "[redacted] threw ice at me, and after it hit me, said 'You bitch, I'm going to rape you.'") was either exaggerated or even wholly false.
Sometimes these are things you can figure out, and sometimes they aren't. Most teenagers are awful liars, but that mostly just lets you eliminate what didn't happen, rather than increase certainty in what did.
But, notably, none of those simple investigatory steps happened here for months. I don't, and Duane Morris LLP's report does not, make any serious analysis of the specific bullying allegations. The teacher in question claims to have believed the student, and wrote down the name of another student that Student 1 claimed was a witness for the specific matter. And then sat by as nothing happened about it.
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It might have. I’ve had people confront me over saying it in casual conversation a few times, years ago (granted in a very progressive environment), and I’ve seen a lot of “r-word” referring to retard in the last few years.
I don't understand how saying 'r-word' is any better. They're referring to the same word, just not putting out the phonemes.
It all seems kind of r-worded.
Yes. This happens with all slurs though.
When people say "N-word", they aren't yelling "You N-word!" at a black person. The signalling would make no sense (I want to yell a slur at you but I want to be Politically Correct about it...?) and they would sound stupid and unprincipled.
When they want to use the slur, they actually use the slur, so by not actually saying the slur, that's a strong signal that they are actually not using the slur. And this reifies the whole signal.
Is this stupid? shrug It's how slurs work.
That's my point. People who are racist just find a new word. Thinking that stopping the word will stop evil is silly.
We can all acknowledge that the euphemism treadmill is kind of dumb. Yet we still defend it because bad people use those words.
In the meantime, silly things like the OK symbol gets trolled into being something it's not... and people still go along with it.
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I’ve always seen it as stupid in the He-who-shall-not-named way. It’s poor communication (if you mean to refer to a slur, then imo it’s much better to simply say the word and be clear what was said and what was meant) but it also gives those words much more power than they’d otherwise have. Half the fun of smoking is knowing that it will really upset the squares, and likewise half the fun of saying retard or nigger is seeing the adults hyperventilating over a single word.
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I mean, the way things are going I could definitely see people in the future using "N-word" as a minced oath. It would certainly be amusing to see a kid try explaining to their teacher or angry parent that they called someone "an N-word, but not the N-word."
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