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Yvain comments on Phoenix Less Wrong Meetup- Saturday, 5-7-11, 5pm - Less Wrong
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I'm neutral on "lame", but not using "idiot" or "moron" is very silly. First of all, the terms were insults before they were technical terms - a sketchy psychologist trying to create a hierarchy of mental retardation just borrowed a few Greek words meaning "fool" which had been adopted into English with their current non-technical meaning long before. Second, practically no one uses them as technical terms anymore and they're severely discouraged in medical settings, partly because they were never that useful to begin with and partly because they're insulting (the currently accepted terms for the same concept are things like "mental retardation" to "profound mental retardation"). Third, idiots in the technical sense (which, I repeat, is never used) would be incapable of being insulted by the term since they cannot understand language.
"Lunatic" is also never used nowadays, and I'm curious whether you also avoid the terms "crazy" and "insane".
I'm mostly working by accepting what amounts to received wisdom from bloggers, who say that "idiot" and "moron" (and for that matter "retarded") are not okay. I don't desperately want any of these words, and the above alternatives exist without (as far as I can tell) offending the bloggers or the people they speak for, so I invest a minor effort in the vocab shift. I'm less willing to do this sort of thing when there is no viable alternative word with the right features.
I use "crazy" and "insane" sometimes, but I have been encouraging the preexisting shift in their meanings towards a not-necessarily-negative meaning of "extreme" (e.g. "this ice cream is insanely yummy!")