To focus in on some "less than complimentary" terms, I can feel the hair on my neck rise when someone calls a person with developmental delays "retarded". After reading Catspaw49's response I have another perspective. Probably all my years of working with people who have "special needs" (after reading all posts its hard to know how to define it). IT IS very difficult to keep up with current vernacular; for example we were instructed for several years to identify a deaf child as "hearing-impaired". Now that I know several deaf adults, I realize THEY are okay with being "deaf", but us hearing folk don't know how to deal with it. Very few have made an effort to understand the deaf culture. Sorcha is right; deaf people are deaf, not stupid. Where I grew up, there were no "African Americans", but I grew up very close to a large "reserve" in British Columbia. The native children were "Indian"; that's how they identified themselves; it was never an isssue. To this day I don't know how they referred to us other than "white". There was no connotation that one was better than the other. Don't get me wrong - the racial issues were there with alot of people, which was unfortunate. Now I live on the East Coast of Canada where there is a long heritage of "African Candadians" here. My experience has been to hear many "African Canadians" refer to themselves as "black". All I know is that political correctness is a necessity in my job and it can sometimes boggle my mind and make me very tired.....perhaps I need to retire?