buylotrogold

I suspect that's why retardation was selected to replace whatever went before - moron or idiot perhaps? Retard implies that the person will eventually catch up intellectually to everyone else, or at least the average person, however improbable that may be in many cases. When I was little (1940s), you could look up idiot , moron, & imbecile and be told that they were technical terms tied to the IQ scale.  But of course the second & third of those had long since followed the first on the downward path to being mere terms of abuse. Retarded indeed seemed to me to be a euphemism when I first heard it. I did not encounter the noun retard until comparatively recently. My impression is that it got its start in Britain in the 1970s and has now spread to the U.S.

I suspect that's why retardation was selected to replace whatever went before - moron or idiot perhaps? Retard implies that the person will eventually catch up intellectually to everyone else, or at least the average person, however improbable that may be in many cases. When I was little (1940s), you could look up idiot , moron, & imbecile and be told that they were technical terms tied to the IQ scale.  But of course the second & third of those had long since followed the first on the downward path to being mere terms of abuse. Retarded indeed seemed to me to be a euphemism when I first heard it. I did not encounter the noun retard until comparatively recently. My impression is that it got its start in Britain in the 1970s and has now spread to the U.S. The other way around, I'd guess. I'mm sure I knew retard as a term of abuse in Canada by the time I was in my early teens