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.

The ugly are described as ‘homely’, ‘plain’, or ‘not conventionally attractive’ by polite people attempting to soften the blow, while the beautiful are just described as beautiful without any recourse to euphemism. Defecation and urination attract euphemisms because they are disgusting, and death and disease attract euphemisms because they are unpleasant to think about. The only exception to the ‘euphemism = bad thing’ rule is sex, which is talked about euphemistically, not because humans regard it as bad, but because we usually regard it as a private act and not suitable to talk about around children.

In The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer described how the euphemism treadmill operates in the case of prostitution:

There used to be a fine family of words which described without reprobation or disgust women who lived outside the accepted sexual laws, but they have faded from current usage. Flatly contemptuous words like kept-woman and call-girl have taken over the field from adventuress, woman of the world, woman of pleasure, mistress, in-amorata, paramour, courtesan, mondaine. When Frank Zappa launched the mythology of the groupie as high priestess of free love and the group grope, he meant the term to remain free from pejorative colouring, but despite the enormous buildup less than six months later most of the women who hung around musicians treated the appellation as an insult. It is the fate of euphemisms to lose their function rapidly by association with the actuality of what they designate.

This phenomenon is not, I think, a consequence of people feeling uncomfortable using sex words in mixed company. Rather, the recurrent pejoration process is rooted in a widespread recognition that prostitution is just bad – it’s unpleasant, dangerous, and very much not something you’d want your daughter to do. Trying to rebrand the sex industry to make it seem nice has never once worked – at least, not for long.

Some progressive attempts at rebranding have stuck. ‘Parenting’, for instance, was originally a politically correct neologism, a verb intended as a gender neutral replacement for mothering or fathering. The widespread public acceptance of that term nowadays suggests that activists were pushing at an open door. But if you’re a political activist constantly battling against the euphemism treadmill, chances are it’s because most people are just not well disposed towards your political programme. A good example of this is the word ‘woke’, which was originally a piece of black American slang, used as early as the 1960s to mean politically aware, particularly on matters relating to race. The word was adopted by white progressives in the late 2010s and swiftly experienced a process of pejoration. ‘Politically correct’ went through the same process: originally a popular phrase among the New Left, it eventually became pejorative and so was abandoned by its proponents.

To return to the ‘r-slur’ for a moment, I think it’s helpful to draw a distinction between the two different purposes that euphemisms can serve. They are good and useful when they are intended to avoid embarrassment and distress in social situations. I don’t endorse using the most precise language possible when talking about defecation and sex in front of your maiden aunt, and I certainly don’t endorse going around calling intellectually disabled children ‘retards.’

It’s the other purpose of euphemisms that makes me uneasy. Euphemism treadmills are useful social signals because they are a highly democratic mechanism for indicating disapproval of something. Perhaps the thing in question is obviously unpopular – death and disease are hardly crowd pleasers – in which case euphemisms clearly serve the ‘easing social tension’ function and are perfectly fine.

But sometimes what’s happening is that something unpopular is being deliberately rebranded by activists to make it seem innocuous and to try and prevent (in Orwell’s words) “calling up mental pictures” of what exactly is being described. The fact that ‘politically correct’ and ‘woke’ both careered off the euphemism treadmill just a short while after their coinage tells us something useful about that brand of politics. The fact that any word for ‘prostitute’ soon becomes an insult directed at disfavoured women who are not actually involved in the sex industry tells us something useful about what people really think about prostitution, deep down. If your political cause relies on forcing people to use euphemisms, and if those euphemisms are being continuously undermined by the process of pejoration, then there’s something amiss with your political cause and no amount of language policing is going to change that.

That is, I believe, why the word ‘retarded’ has left the late-twentieth century playground and entered twenty-first century political discourse. The people on the Right who describe their opponents as ‘retarded’ – quite possibly in a crude, aggressive, or puerile manner – are sending out a political signal that has nothing whatsoever to do with intellectual disability, and everything to do with rejecting progressive politics as such.