Thanks for not taking offence, Rick (and for the warm words) - "Moron" is an odd word. In a way it's moved away from its original pseudo-scientific meaning, in the sense thatyou wouldn't now get many professinal experts using it to label people destined for some kind of provision. It's a bit like "idiot" in that way.

But "idiot", in my experience, has developed a relatively non-offensive use, normally pronounced "eejit". And that is really going back to the Greek origins of the word, where it didn't have anything to do with lack of intelligence, it was more a question of not using the intelligence you have.

That hasn't quite happened to "moron", and it gets casually thrown away in a way that suggests, as I said, that people who would score very low on Intelligence Tests are also likely to be insensitive and so forth, and that just isn't true. (And I'm not saying that people who use the term necessarily have that thought in their mind, because I know in many cases they don't.)

It's a different point from the one about the use of terms, it's about stereotypes. It's rather like objecting to the term "to Jew down" someone in a business deal - one wouldn't be objecting in that case to the word used, but rather to the assumption lying behind the use of it.