Using "autistic" as a derogatory term; please don't

[Ganoncrotch]

CGI-Quality said:

📢

I had a discussion with The Mod Team about this. Many of them feel like the term "autistic screeching", whether a meme or not, is inappropriate. They also feel the word "autistic", as an insult, is just as bad as other words we find inappropriate around here. My personal input? While there are surely words/terms/phrases that can be seen as jokes and what not, people with genuine autism (or with a friend/relative who suffers from it) don't find it funny at all. No different than calling someone a "retard". Because these things have lasting consequences on the sufferer, I get where The Team, and curl, are coming from, though I don't feel quite as strongly about it.

So, here's what I'll do. From this post on, I want genuine responses to this. How do you feel about a Global (Sitewide) restriction on words like these? This is simply to know where many of you stand.

Completely down to the context it's used in, I think there are times when pretty much every word has a use, while I completely understand where Curl is coming from which is just a polite request for people to understand that they might be offending others when they use it and to consider substituting it for something else to be just fine.

I think saying certain words are too bad to ever utter is too far, especially if you say that words in general have a scale as to which ones are the worst word, it completely depends on the context it's used in, every family on Earth has been impacted by cancer (my own very close family included in this) but still it's a term which is thrown out in every day use in both an insult or just a descriptor of a bad thing (I've even done that myself in the last few days http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8835922 ) but if you want to put a blanket ban on a certain condition being used as a adjective you are going to have to consider which other conditions join that word, I've said to you in a PM my "trigger" but still if you start to create a list of things which shouldn't be used at all on here you'll find that most medical conditions/nationalities and pretty much a bevy of other things will be added to it very quickly as those words have the potential to cause hurt if they're used in a certain context.

 

Again, can't emphasis enough how I feel about this CONTEXT CONTEXT CONTEXT.