Back in November, Donald Trump called Gov. Tim Walz “retarded.” “Yeah, I think there’s something wrong with him.” We’re hearing more of that word lately. My name is John McWhorter and I teach linguistics at Columbia University. The kind of linguist I happen to be is much more interested in sentences than words, but I completely understand that the general public is more interested in words. So Elon Musk has used “retarded,” and you see an awful lot of it on X these days. Joe Rogan, on one episode, he actually said that—— “Retarded is back. And it’s one of the great culture victories.” During my adulthood, and I don’t think I’m alone, the word has been considered taboo. I feel funny saying it now. In 2012 I was doing a class at Columbia and there was a student. She had grown up in Brazil. She was talking about somebody having shot a capybara, and she was saying that she and her friends thought that the person was retarded and the class just exploded with laughter. And we had to gently teach her that that word is no longer used. And so, to understand why it became so loaded, we have to understand that it was part of a process. It became loaded. It used to be that if you talked about someone who had that kind of cognitive challenge, then you could openly use the words “moron” and “imbecile” and “idiot.” In comparison to “moron” and “imbecile” and “idiot,” “retarded” was actually very civilized and gentle. What happened was what’s called the euphemism treadmill. It’s when we invent a term that is supposed to evade the unpleasant associations of one that we have, but the problem is that the new term is eventually going to take on the same unfortunate associations, unless there’s a radical change in thought. And of course, that only happens now and then. Now, in the meantime, MAGA, it’s all about resisting taboos. It’s all about holding up a middle finger. A major motivation of it is we are not going to observe the proprieties. “They don’t know what the [EXPLETIVE] they’re doing. Do you understand that?” “He doesn’t want to [EXPLETIVE] around with the United States.” “But his daughter is a very dumb individual.” “Quiet, piggy.” And so when a president physically mocks the disabled —— “He’s going like: I don’t remember.” The question would be why he wouldn’t use the word “retarded.” You knew it was coming. “Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?” Pretty soon it’ll be in the Oval Office. It’s of a piece with his saying that Representative Ilhan Omar does quote unquote “nothing but bitch” or celebrating Rob Reiner’s murder. “He was a deranged person ——” And frankly, we can be quite sure that there will be more of these recreational transgressions from the man and his pals, especially given that increasingly many are questioning whether Trump himself is gradually slipping into, well, let’s just say, cognitive challenge.
