Sidney J. Mussburger: “You’re from the basement, aren’t you? And weren’t blessed with much… education.”
Norville Barnes: “Well, I’m a college graduate.”
Mussburger: “But… you did not excel in your studies?”
Barnes: “Well… I made the Dean’s List.”
Mussburger: “Oh.”
Barnes: “At the Muncie College of Business Administration.”
Mussburger: “Oho! Uh… and your friends, they called you ‘jerk,’ did they?”
Barnes: “No.”
Mussburger: “Dope?”
Barnes: “Uh-uh.”
Mussburger: “Dipstick?”
Barnes: “No…”
Mussburger: “Lame-brain?”
Barnes: “No!”
Mussburger: “Schmo?”
Barnes: “No!”
Mussburger: “Not even behind your back?”
Barnes: “No, as a matter of fact, they voted me most likely to succeed.”
Mussburger: “You’re fired!”
I do love that movie. And maybe some of those epithets don’t run the risk of tarring the wrong people with the brush aimed solely at the intended target.
But anyway, this discussion has really made me think, and I’m grateful to @MarjaE for bringing it up. I enjoy the richness of pejorative language, not because I enjoy the pain such language causes its targets and those who identify with them, but because of the poetic imagination that sometimes accompanies the creation of such terms. Of course, virtually none of us have the wit and creativity to craft our very own bespoke insults, so we rely upon the tried-and-true schoolyard taunts of generations past, which is a bummer. If we’re gonna insult each other, the least we could do is care enough to craft a personalized zinger.
I’ve had a few thrown my way. I’ve been called “nerd” and “geek” and “dork” back when being considered such was, if not exactly fatal, pretty likely to get one beat up (and it did, a few times). I was called “four-eyes” by someone who apparently got their insults from Judy Blume’s tamer books. I’ve been body-shamed with “beanpole,” my pants were poverty-shamed as being “highwaters,” a certain crush started calling me a “scuzz” when she learned about said crush, my acne got me called “pizza-face” a couple times… all fairly run-of-the-mill for the early 80s. I didn’t know anyone who hated me for the color of my skin, my gender or sexuality, my religion or eventual lack thereof, or any of the things that really do seem to inspire people to try hard to make one’s life miserable. For the most part, whatever they gave me shit about, I eventually outgrew. So I’m very fortunate and privileged, in that regard.
I seem to recall that there’s been a pretty active movement away from using “spastic” as an insult in the UK, partly (I think) because the word was used until pretty recently to actually refer to people who experienced muscle spasms due to some disorder or other. The word has taken longer to fade from halfway-polite conversation in the States, possibly because nobody has used it in good faith to describe a person with such a condition since before I was born, but rather it’s been used by kids to describe other kids with poor impulse control. Little brothers have been labeled “spaz” by older siblings for generations in my neighborhoods, to the point that most of them don’t even realize the origin of the word, just as my friends and I didn’t know where “gyp” came from, since we thought we knew what gypsies were (in a half-assed saw-some-in-a-Wolf-Man-movie-once sense), but never had any inkling they might have been popularly and unjustly disparaged for dealing unfairly in business transactions. I think the last time I read someone referring to a “spastic little brother,” it was Stephen King, and not even in a piece of fiction, but using the term in his own voice, in a column somewhere within the last decade. And he was using it in the same sense my friends always did, having nothing to do with neurological motor control, but rather involving the behavior of one’s little brother when he’s following you and your older pals around, acting out, disrupting your plans, making goofy and noisy outbursts, not particularly trying to fit in, and making you, the older sibling, somehow less cool by association.
But the term is inarguably associated with various disabilities, even if through obsolete usage, and so most people are finally getting around to ending its social acceptability as an (intended mild) insult. But what do we do about stupidity? Can it be cleanly separated from blameless mental limitation? Is there a way to call out a person whom we perceive to be acting stupidly without insulting people with cognitive disabilities at the same time? Should we call out stupidity at all? It always seems to be treated as more of a moral failure than just a medical condition.
My younger sister has Down syndrome, and as a result I became a bit impatient with classmates who used “retarded” as a pejorative. I learned a bit about the history of “idiot,” “moron,” and “imbecile” being used as gradations of low I.Q. when I was in high school, but even then such usages were obsolete, and I knew nobody who used them at all to refer to people with genuine developmental or mental disabilities. Everyone just used them the way most Americans do now: to insult people who we really think ought to know better, as opposed to those whose cognitive failures are medically based, and certainly not the fault of the person in question.
But now I’m beginning to wonder if there’s any value at all in labeling people as “stupid” or “dumb” or “foolish” at all. Certainly we’d prefer our authority figures to possess a degree of wisdom, of insight, of intelligence, of education, of wit. We come down on them pretty hard when they fail at these aspirations, because we’d like to set our standards higher for the authority figures than we set them for hoi polloi.
But though we might find it reprehensible for someone to do something we’d consider “boneheaded” when we feel they really should know better, either by possessing experience or education that should preclude such action, can we blame the dipstick for doing something dippy when the dipstick is merely inexperienced, untutored, possibly unlettered, or otherwise not expected to meet that moment’s performance requirements? I’d hate to be confronted with a critical Calculus problem wherein the lives of a few astronauts were at stake, based upon my own experience with Calculus which was both fairly cursory and a few decades in the past. Would I be a numbskull if those astronauts were to perish as a result of my own miscalculation?
In my opinion, only if I believed (or caused others to believe) that I actually was up to the task, up until the moment I failed utterly to accomplish it. If I confessed upfront that my training and experience weren’t up to the task, nobody would feel tempted to call me a moron for confessing this limitation, right? At least, nobody worth knowing.
I don’t know. It’s one of those cases where I feel someone with the cognitive capabilities of my sister cannot be blamed for her actions, whereas a dipstick like our President can and should be blamed for his dipshittery, no matter how many doctor’s notes of excuse he could provide.
All her life, my sister has surprised people with her judgement and discretion in many unexpected areas. She never learned to read, and her spoken vocabulary is quite small, but she never does anything that might cause injury to herself or anyone else. Our dad habitually said of her, “She has Down syndrome; she’s not stupid.”