Which disability? And the pluralization implies there are multiple considerations.

This isn’t being flippant. I have bipolar, and word choice and word usage is important to me. A trend I’ve noticed is in the attempt to avoid marginalization terms become so evasive as to be useless.

I gave a presentation at a middle school in the South Valley on mental health stigmas and encouraged the kids to make a list of what they call folks with mental health disorders like bipolar, depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, etc. My favorite was “psychtard.” Truly. I was amused and impressed. Kids are so creative.

Considering how often “tard” is conjoined with interesting prefixes or engineered into interesting compound words, I see little chance of excising the word “retard” from the vernacular. Guiding the meaning of the word “retard” elsewhere is the better bet.