The Sarah Palin stories, about the use of the word "retarded" and whether it's satire and all, made me remember when I used to work with retarded adults in a community living program. This was about 25 or 30 years ago.

I worked with 3 men who were physically handicapped as well as mentally retarded, but because I was a low-level employee I did not know what their IQs were. I think I knew categories, like "moderately mentally retarded" or "profoundly," etc., which helped me not at all since I didn't know what the terms meant, exactly. Anyway, one day one of the men I was taking care of (severe physical handicaps, whatever his MR status was) overheard another worker mention that the man's roommate was mentally retarded.

He was astonished. "He is?" he asked me. I nodded. It was not a secret, since the entire program was funded because it served people who were MR.

Then the man told me that he'd met a lot of retards in the institution he'd lived in a while back. These "retards" did things like flush their socks down the toilet. Real idiots. Then he said, "H is retarded?"

I said yes, but this didn't mean what he seemed to think it meant. H, the roommate, obviously wasn't a jerk who would flush socks down the toilet, nothing like that.

He paused, then he asked, "Am I?"

And I chickened out. I knew what he was asking me was momentous for him. He deserved a better answer than whatever prevaricating thing I said. I told him I wasn't sure, that he had lots of educational disabilities, etc., and I don't remember what else I said, exactly.

"I know I'm slow," he said. We talked some more, and he didn't seem upset. But he hadn't gotten the truth, that he was definitely classified by society as MR.

The word retarded is so loaded. Not surprising that a man almost 40 had never once been told that he was that.

Sarah Palin should have gone and punched Limbaugh in the stomach for his cavalier overuse of the word (over 20 times in the one portion of the show), the way he was trying to punish people with it. It's not a case of worrying about politically correct language -- it was a direct insult by Limbaugh, who used it in a context which definitely included her child.