The return of slurs in liberal language

History famously repeats itself. Still, I never expected "retarded," the insult du jour of my youth, to come back in style — especially after it was canceled only years ago.

These days, mostly on X, I see liberal-identifying people dropping the word as casually as when I was a preteen in the mid-aughts. It's trickled into offline conversations as well, used to embellish how stupid a person, situation, or political stance is.

The word is so ubiquitous that even mainstream movies and TV shows have caught on. The billion-dollar R-rated hit "Deadpool & Wolverine," a Disney film, included a pointed joke in which a character pronounces "retired" in a deliberate way. In the trailer for a coming FX show, "English Teacher," one character notes that kids are "not into being woke anymore": "They're saying the R-word again."

I've also seen homophobic language punctuating my timeline, including the return of "gay" as an insult. Slurs have apparently undergone a major rebrand, like a pendulum swing that upends the idea of liberals being precious gatekeepers of inoffensive speech.

A few weeks ago, I started asking left-leaning people their thoughts on slurs being peppered into everyday conversations. Everyone from moderates to Marxists told a similar story: At the height of the pandemic, the left became fixated on using the most inclusive terminology. As people felt increasingly cautious and nervous about always saying the wrong thing, a backlash — the resurgence of edgier speech — was hardly surprising.

An inclusive era

Kayla Cash, a 31-year-old PR manager, grew up using words she now considers offensive. "In middle school, I was definitely saying those things because I didn't know any better," she told me. Some of the language felt ubiquitous; she remembers the 2004 release of "Let's Get It Started," the Grammy-winning Black Eyed Peas hit that was originally released as "Let's Get Retarded."

When Cash went to the University of Idaho in the early 2010s, expanding her world and experiences, she started questioning what she had heard growing up, learning "to be aware of how we're positioning language when we're describing other people."

The world was changing. In 2010, the Obama administration signed Rosa's Law, legislation that replaced "mental retardation" with "intellectual disability" in federal health, education, and labor laws. Online regulations tightened as well: After several high-profile harassment campaigns, Twitter (now X) introduced a "report abuse" button and started suspending accounts.

Social media really came into play at this time, too. "A variety of different folks were exposed to your speech," Ari Lightman, a digital marketing and media professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told me. "Consequently, that led to more of a discussion."

A person could tweet a joke they would otherwise have told only a close friend group and hear exactly why it might upset a stranger. Suddenly, feedback on what was considered outdated or in poor taste was immediate and ubiquitous, translating to real-life changes in how we refer to one another, Lightman said.

People grew more cautious online and withheld their opinions, worried about social media pile-ons and becoming the so-called main character of the day, especially if it could result in lasting professional consequences. Comedians, including Seth MacFarlane and Kevin Hart, were panned for unsavory jokes (in Hart's case, ones he had made seven years prior).

Robbie Goodwin, a comedian who describes himself as being "on the progressive, social-democrat side of things," told me he thought the trend of people self-censoring "would've died a more natural death" had Donald Trump not been elected in 2016. Goodwin felt his peers were compelled to counteract Trump's inflammatory rhetoric. "It kind of put it into overdrive then, so I think the tone-policing stuff lasted a very, very long time," he said.

Ultimately, we rely on words to express ourselves. Lightman said he believes that the prevalence of slurs on both sides of the political spectrum "reflects what society's undergoing collectively." He thinks people have been searching for words to convey their anger, particularly regarding the pandemic and political frustrations. "Certain words have less of a punch to them, less volatility," he said. "Other words get replaced by that."

The rise of the 'dirtbag left'

Political-pressure-cooker moments often trigger counterculture. The Vietnam War empowered the hippie movement, and 1980s DIY punk rock in the US was a response to Reagan policies like cuts to social services.

I remember first hearing about the "Red Scare" podcast in 2020, two years after it launched. It was billed as discussions between two "bohemian layabouts" who called out performative aspects of progressive politics — while using language more often associated with the right, such as that offensive term for someone with intellectual disabilities. They were "a refreshing critique of the increasingly polarized political landscape," as one New York Times writer put it. While mainstream progressive politics felt chaste and pedantic, "Red Scare" carved out space for the "dirtbag left" by pushing back.

Many people mentioned "Red Scare" when I asked people on X about their relationship with slurs. In more than 100 responses in my DMs and a Google form, there was a pervasive feeling that certain elements of progressive politics felt performative — all talk. One survey respondent characterized some on the left as "superficial liberals who've shown they mostly care more about the appearance of goodness more than anything more."

"When people started to obsess and fixate on 'spaz' and 'insane' and 'handicapped,' it felt like you couldn't possibly keep up with it anymore," one respondent wrote. "I want to be respectful and inclusive always, but the left's continued tendency to devour itself gets old." Another respondent, while "not a fan" of their friends using throwback offensive insults again, said it felt like a response to "tiptoeing around marginalized groups, using therapy speak, and being cautious not to offend."

One 29-year-old New Yorker who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution told me she freely used some offensive words, such as "faggot" and "tranny," to convey openness with others. As a trans woman, she bristles at anyone making assumptions about her politics because of her identity. "I don't want that wall, so I will more casually than others bring out these words," she said. "I think people are kind of sick of these echo chambers."

For some, using forbidden words is a lot simpler than wanting to bridge divides: It's exciting. "I think it shows closeness to say taboo things around friends," a survey respondent said, adding that this was especially true when they know their friends don't mean it in a derogatory way. "I think like many of my peers, I feel victim to this ultra left and sterilized manner of speaking in college. I think we got tired of that!" Another said: "It eats and makes me feel a little rush. im being naughty!"

People are craving levity. After 2020, "people got really tired of being upset all the time," the Vox correspondent Zach Beauchamp theorized in a recent episode of "The Ezra Klein Show." It's no accident that the Democratic campaign is meme-driven. The liberal coalition "sanded off the self-righteousness that a lot of people found unappealing about it," embracing irony and a mocking self-awareness, Beauchamp said.

Looser language and new rules

Everyone I talked to for this story had rules for which words they would and wouldn't say.

Overwhelmingly, people drew hard lines against anyone but people of color uttering racial slurs, such as the N-word. People were also largely aligned on certain homophobic language: It's OK for queer people to use, or reclaim, these slurs, and less OK for straight people to say them.

Lines blurred around the word whose comeback first got me thinking about this subject. A few people clarified that they meant it as a synonym for idiotic or bad and would never aim it at a disabled person.

A 35-year-old Brooklyn man, who asked to be anonymous for professional reasons, said he didn't like it when some of his friends said it but, at the same time, "maybe it doesn't matter." Synonyms for "stupid" such as "idiot," "moron," and "imbecile," all originated as clinical terms for people with intellectual disabilities but are all more accepted today, with only the one being widely singled out. "Maybe we should be focusing on helping people in real material ways and not just focusing on words," he said.

I talked to a 33-year-old man who was diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder as a child (later "just folded into autistic spectrum disorder"), a nonverbal learning disability, and sensory integration disorder. He prefers to describe himself as "retarded. "

"I'm still kind of retarded in some ways," the man, who asked to remain anonymous for the same reasons as other anonymous sources in this story, told me. "I get lost very easily and have trouble with instructions. It is just a lot easier to get people to understand where I'm at, to just say, 'Oh, I'm kind of retarded' instead of whipping out some jargon-laden thing I was diagnosed with in 1997."

He doesn't think you should call someone with a disability anything derogatory — whether it's "retard," "idiot," or "stupid." As for using it more broadly, "it depends on the connotations," he said. It's one thing to say a politician he dislikes is "retarded," but if the word offends someone he's around, he'll stop using it.

Goodwin, who uses the word in his comedy routines to denote something "beyond stupid," also doesn't like how people like Joe Rogan use it to bash people. He "rolls his eyes" at troll-y uses of the word on X, which has looser policies on speech after Elon Musk bought it in 2022.

It raises crucial questions. Even if the intent is just to be more relaxed around speech, where is the line that distinguishes hard-nos from other slurs? Plus, with the anonymity granted online, who could confidently say that the person using a word is reclaiming it or abusing it?

"In the very highly polarized, highly turbulent world that we live in, maybe it's my naivete, but we're all sort of relaxing a little bit," Lightman said. He theorizes that by popularizing and reclaiming taboo words, "inflammatory speech can be reduced somewhat so it doesn't have the emphasis and power that it used to."

The 35-year-old Brooklyn man acknowledges sometimes feeling the impulse to say "retard" when joking with his friends. He still wonders what it all means. "It just feels like it would feel good or transgressive in a way that I want to be transgressive," he said. "I don't say the word because I don't think it's right, but I think that it's evidence of this big thing in the ether that we're just responding to."