Why the Right loves the ‘r-slur’

Euphemism treadmills as political signals

An audio version of this essay – read by me – is available below the paywall.

When I was at school, no one said ‘retarded.’ If a friend was being annoying or obtuse, we’d call them ‘special’ – as in ‘special educational needs’, the term then in use in the British education system to refer to students with disabilities, generally cognitive ones. A term introduced in the late twentieth century as a gentle euphemism for disabled children was swiftly repurposed by non-disabled children because they thought it was funny.

In our defence – although we were, of course, extraordinarily obnoxious – we never used the pejorative version of ‘special’ to refer to actual disabled people. Similarly, although the word ‘retarded’ has lately become popular on the American Right, it is typically not directed at the intellectually disabled, but instead at political enemies, often abstract ones. As Rolling Stone laments:

You have Anna Khachiyan of the edgelord podcast Red Scare, which helped repopularize these terms, using that word to describe progressives in the wake of the 2024 election; Elon Musk replying “F u retard” to a Finnish doctoral student on his platform X (formerly Twitter) who accurately described him as a historically dangerous purveyor of disinformation; and countless users across alt-tech sites including Kick, Rumble, Gab, and Truth Social who have inserted the word in their account handle. TikTok blocks you from searching the slur, noting that it “may be associated with hateful behavior” — a change implemented after Mashable contacted them about the use of the word on the app — but it’s all over Facebook and Reddit.

Much like ‘special’, the ‘r-slur’ was once a gentle euphemism, intended to replace older words like ‘moron’ and ‘imbecile’ with a word that translates as ‘slow.’ ‘Intellectual disability’ is the preferred term right now, but that will no doubt eventually become pejorative too. In 1974, the sociolinguist Sharon Henderson Taylor coined the term ‘euphemism cycle’ to describe the process by which medical terms or euphemisms used to describe intellectual disability eventually become pejorative. Steven Pinker later offered a slight variation on the idea, coining the term ‘euphemism treadmill’ to describe the futility of trying to arrest this process. No matter how many well-meaning adults try and invent new terms to describe disability, children will always find a way of turning them into insults.

Nonetheless, inspired in part by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – a favourite of every introductory course in the social sciences – progressive activists have directed a great deal of energy towards language policing as a key plank of their vision of change. The idea is that, by changing what people say, they can also change how people think, and thereby change the world. This doesn’t just apply to disability, but also to race, class, gender, sexuality, and so on – the hope is that more inclusive language will produce a more inclusive society.

Activists are right to think that this stuff is important, but they overstate the effect that language has on our thinking. As Steven Pinker wrote in his original essay on the euphemism treadmill:

Despite the appeal of the theory that words inspire thought, no cognitive scientist believes it. People coin new words, grapple for le mot juste, translate from other languages, and ridicule or defend P.C. terms. None of this would be possible if the ideas expressed by words were identical to the words themselves.

Nonetheless, I’m persuaded by a softer version of the argument: that words don’t determine thinking, but they do nudge it. Three years before the publication of 1984, George Orwell wrote an essay on the use of euphemisms in his own era, titled Politics and the English Language:

Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Orwell’s famous neologisms – doublethink, joycamp, Ministry of Truth, etc. – were inspired by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, but every political institution or movement tries to massage language to some degree. The terms ‘pro choice’ and ‘pro life’, for instance, emphasise the virtues of the two political camps, while drawing attention away from the respective sets of trade offs. Good politics necessitates good branding.

But some efforts at linguistic updates just get stuck on the euphemism treadmill again and again. The euphemism treadmill is particularly fast when it comes to intellectual disability, for instance, because it’s very difficult to persuade people that lack of intelligence is a good thing. I know that sounds harsh – nice people adopt these terms precisely to avoid sounding harsh – but it’s important to spell this out clearly: we only use euphemisms for bad things.