Terra

you have been turned into this cat breed!

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

req'd by @starcunning

uh oh the cakes

req'd by @starcunning

uh oh the cakes

[VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I think we have to accept the fact that the R-word is permanently coming back and it's functionally changed meanings to no longer directly refer to disabled people.

I mean, if you think about the words "idiot," "imbecile," and "moron," those used to be genuine medical classifications from the 1910s until the 1960s when they started to feel offensive. Then doctors switched to the R-word, which also functioned as a real medical classification for about 50 years, until it became too insulting and we again had to replace it, because it simply didn't serve the same scientific purpose anymore.

This entire cycle is called the euphemism treadmill, and the idea is that words around sensitive topics will always grow more negative over time, making us come up with new words that will then also get negative. On the flip side, however, once we sufficiently distance a word from its historical usage, it stops taking on the same offensive power and just becomes colloquial instead.

Like very few people really use the words "idiot" or "imbecile" to overtly mock an intellectual disability anymore, and, in the same way, the R-word is slowly just shifting into something people say with their friends.

That doesn't mean it's a good thing or that you should say the word - in fact, I think it's counterproductive to even call people idiots and morons. However, it is undeniably true that the people who are afraid to say the R-word right now are going to get old and die out, while younger generations keep saying it with no knowledge of where it came from.

The real problem is why the euphemism treadmill exists in the first place, because unless we communicate with kindness and intentionality, we'll always keep making new words offensive.