[RubberbandSoul]

Spillover from medical terms is very common. You sometimes hear someone being called a "psycho" or a "sociopath" but you don't make the assumption that the accuser is a trained psychiatrist.

"Idiot" used to be a medical condition, someone suffering from idiocy.

"Retard"; someone whose mental development had been retarded and remained in a childhood state into adulthood.

These words are not supposed to be taken literally (when used colloquially) but to suggest that the person in question displays signs of the medical condition.

I guess we could try to label this as misuse of the terms and try to end the practice, but where would that lead us? "Bob is double plus ungood at thinking"?

[marcus_holmes]

It's known as the "Euphemism Treadmill" [0]. I remember "spastic" being a playground insult having been a medical term a couple decades previously.

[0] http://englishcowpath.blogspot.com/2011/06/euphemism-treadmi...

[grumple]

You make some good points, I think. The extrapolation I’d make is that even that last statement is offensive. As some say, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”. There’s a culture of decency, and it is opposed to a culture of liberty. Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t have decency, but that everything should be kept in balance. We shouldn’t embrace Gilead’s “freedom from”.

[smichel17]

I'm not quite sure how these are inherently in conflict. It seems like a community might allow the use of slurs as insults while also discouraging insults in general. In different words, "Please be nice to each other. We don't ban for the use of any particular words, but we do ban for disparaging others."

I could easily imagine a policy like this in, say, a linguistics forum, where it's totally allowed to discuss the usage of slurs, as long as they're not directed at someone.