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Banewaffles t1_j65fa6k wrote

Reply to comment by kevnmartin in After 30+ years, 'The Stinky Cheese Man' is aging well by drak0bsidian

St*nky

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kevnmartin t1_j65h9v2 wrote

Akshually the word was "stupid".

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Just_thefacts_jack t1_j65zoi9 wrote

I struggle with this a bit. I grew up using stupid, dumb, idiot, moron, spaz, etc. I was recently informed by a friend with an autistic son that they don't use any of those words in their house both because a) they're hurtful and b) because historically they were pejorative terms/slurs for neurodivegent and intellectually disabled people.

I try my best to be sensitive with the words I use but these words have always felt safe, even innocent. Nobody is shaming me for using them, I'm just trying to be kind, but they slip in without me even noticing.

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freemason777 t1_j67q0gv wrote

As a nuerodivergent, being precious about language can be very stupid

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Euphoric-Low-9222 t1_j68k9ck wrote

IMO, stopping the usage of any word hurtful or otherwise is like book burning.

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subparhooker t1_j68gymd wrote

I grew up not being aloud to say those words and others. I also wasn't allowed to express emotion that wasn't joy. It's actually left me a bit repressed and unable to cope with different emotions

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Just_thefacts_jack t1_j6cadpu wrote

Oof, not being allowed to express negative emotions was a big one in my family too. Hope you're dealing with that ok.

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kevnmartin t1_j65zwaq wrote

That's heartbreaking. My husband's family was like that. I get it. He took a different book next time. Probably one of his Nate The Great books.

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ArmadilloFour t1_j68fm66 wrote

Every negative term has been wielded against ostracized groups. At some point you have to stop blacklisting words for that reason, or you're going to simply run out of negative words to use.

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Just_thefacts_jack t1_j6ca9rm wrote

I don't know if I agree, I sorta took it as a challenge to come up with more creative insults instead of punching down (whether intentionally or not).

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ArmadilloFour t1_j6d1gz9 wrote

And that's admirable! But I feel like either you've got to come up with incredibly arbitrary terms to use which just feel made up and hard to understand the connotations of ("Yuck, that dude is such a gooseberry!"), or you pick another term which already has sort of negative vibes ("I thought that book was really sludgy"), but you have to work to wrap the word around a meaning it doesn't have. And either way, it feels inevitable that if either of them caught on, they would be applied to ostracized groups in a way that would bring us right back to where we started ("I hate that dude, he's such a gooseberry" -> "You shouldn't call people gooseberries, it's got an ableist history".)

What more creative insults did you come up with, out of curiosity?

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Just_thefacts_jack t1_j6oawfa wrote

Gooseberry is/was a popular one in the UK. I also landed on Muppet, potato, loaf of bread/piece of toast, dipshit, lump, clod, lummox. Really any word for an inanimate object, especially simple/unremarkable objects, seems to do the trick.

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