Recede? Recede and retard are not synonyms by any stretch of the imagination. I'm going to assume you are not a native English speaker so I am going to include some definitions for your edification:
recede - to go or move away; retreat; go to or toward a more distant point; withdraw.
retard - to make slow; delay the development or progress of (an action, process, etc.); hinder or impede.
Imagine you are standing on a beach by a bay. As the tide goes out the water is receding. If you build a wall across the mouth of the bay, so that the high tide waters cannot leave the bay, then you are retarding the waters.
Recede doesn't mean the same thing. If something advances, then it receding means it moves in the opposite direction. If the advancement is retarded it still advances but more slowly.
Words have meaning. Words have power. This much is not in debate, as far as I'm concerned (so far). Where I have to take pause is taking one usage (however derogatory) of a word and applying to every meaning and usage regardless of what the context actually is as some manifestation of virtue signalling. At this point we may as well throw out language, diction and rhetoric entirely as any word and phrase can be twisted to be offensive even when a word is used entirely and wholly in accurate and proper context.
People with receding hairline are not marginalized by society
You're obviously not aware with how common male baldness jokes are in sitcoms and entertainment, are you? I encourage you watch a few episodes of Seinfeld to see how much influence hair and baldness has on men and their self esteem in the dating world.
They might not be marginalized, but then again I guess it depends on how one is using the word 'marginalized' to begin with, which brings us back to square one: turnabout is a bitch.
FINE. Turnabout is fair play. I think you understood precisely the point I was attempting to make specifically by phrasing it the way I did. If your analysis of communication is to unpack and divine words back to one specific meaning but not others, how do you communicate[1]? How do you know which meaning to take issue with (that's a genuine question if you care to bother) and which ones are okay? Is it just words that at some point in history been taken and used abusively? Or are they words with novelty that only now are problematic because some group has taken it upon themselves to designate them as such? How do they do so? What do they use to decide this and how can the rest of us buy tickets to ride this clue(less)train?
You are also trivialising the real suffering and daily struggles of mentally handicapped people by comparing it to the "struggle" of bald people
By insisting that we pay a bit more respect to the precedent that language is fluid, mutable and variable and questioning the behavior of linking fringe pejorative with social vernacular (or spoken like a layperson: "What, because I said words have more than one meaning and using a word by its dictionary definition in the fully correct and appropriate context does not mean I am de facto calling someone with mental disability "retarded"?)
No. Not at all. But something familiar about the accusation you've just lobbed at me, plus that utterly worthless comment about "living in the past", indicates to me I'm not going to get very far with this. So I'm gonna just go ahead and bow out right now.
You've never heard the term receding hairline? I would think that hairline would be the first thing Americans would think of when hearing the word recede. I must ask, where did you learn English?
But you're still digging in heels and refusing to entertain the notion of 'context clues' with respect to how words are used beyond carte blanche association of words and their meanings to the marginalization of social groups? I don't understand this.
