The 'r' word

Retarded. Retard. I hate it when people use those words. It can be difficult because even people close to me, people I like and respect, come out with it when I'm least expecting it. I sometimes wonder if I physically flinch - I'm not sure, but I certainly do mentally. I think a lot of people with mental disability in their family (for me, my younger sister) have the same reaction. I'm not a confrontational person either, which adds to it because the pain is doubled when I hate myself for not speaking up. These words are just so accepted as pejoratives, I think people throw them around a lot more casually than they do homophobic/racist language, yet to me, it's just as offensive.
Below is an excerpt from a critical review of Nuts and Zoo Weekly magazines. I agree with the most of the sentiment of the review and enjoy the F Word blog but this irked me:

I've never, ever got 'Lad' 'Culture' - why subscribe to a school of thought that encourages you at act like a complete retard?

Thing is - I don't think that Lad Culture encourages its subscribers to act like disabled people. I think it encourages its subscribers to act like beer-swilling, offensive-joke-telling, sexist loudmouths. To suggest that mentally disabled people act like 'Lads' is blatently a ridiculous conflation as it assumes that a)all mentally disabled people behave the same way and are not individuals and b)that the defining features of this behavior (so 'typical' of the mentally disabled) are to drink a lot of beer, make offensive jokes and comments, and belittle and demean women. Grrr.

The second time I got slapped with the 'r' word this week was when I was reading one of my favourite blogs, one I read daily and whose writers I admire greatly. So I suppose it is ironic that a comment on a piece about rhetorical mishaps reads like this

If you want to get your hide really tanned for rhetorical mishaps have a gander at Chris Clarke's awesome post taking people to task for slurring the red states as if we were one monolithical mass of retarded.

I suspect the sentiment here is possibly 'backward' which is often given as 'what I really meant' when this subject comes up. It's just that, for me at least, it is very difficult to divorce the word from the image of a mentally disabled person and so the negative connotations pile up. It's interesting that I feel really guilty for writing this post, kind of like how I used to feel for criticising language that I thought was anti-woman. It makes me realise that I'm still afraid of appearing to be 'difficult'. I'm working on it...