My Mom still calls Downs people Mongoloids. My older neighbors calls my daughters black friends Colored. I call savants Idiot Savants. Retarded is now Mentally Handicapped. I know people thinks its all PC, but is it? How does an accepted term become unaccepted?
In modern America, it's generally the press that establishes these conventions. They may be initially perpetrated by populist organizations and given a little time to be tested to see if they catch on within the community sympathetic to the cause they are meant to promote. But they don't really permeate our culture until the media pick them up.
My own personal hot button is the term "creationism" and this scholarly discussion is probably the only time you'll ever see me legitimize it by typing it. Excuse me while I wipe the spit off of my screen. It should be called what it is: "evolution denial," just like the term "Holocaust denial." The C-word was coined by religious fundie crackpots, it caught on in the religious fundie crackpot community, and for reasons only the goddess knows the media adopted it at the time of the Great Religious Fundie Crackpot Revival in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Language is a powerful and subversive tool, and tens of millions of Americans have been brainwashed by the seeming respectability of the C-word into believing that evolution denialism is a legitimate scientific theory.
"Idiot savant" was in use as recently as 1988, when the movie "Rain Man" brought the public attention to the issue. Who could call Dustin Hoffman an "idiot"? The problem with just plain "savant" is that it means something else. A savant is a person of learning, especially in a particular field of expertise. I doubt that Marilyn Vos Savant, the popular columnist with the world's highest documented IQ, is pleased with the trend of using her name for a type of cognitive disability.
"Mongoloid" was in use thirty years ago. It was the title of one of New Wave band Devo's jumpiest songs.
Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid: one chromosome too many.
The terms mongoloid, caucasoid and negroid are still used in the popular paradigm of three human "races," but they are so politically incorrect--as are virtually all alternative naming conventions that include labels like "white" or "Oriental"--that discussion of this paradigm is somewhat stifled.
I have seen non-Americans innocently use the term "coloured" on SciForums. The discussion of race is so politically charged that the terminology that is safe and accepted changes at least once with every generation. I must point out that the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People is one of America's most honored organizations. The cliche goes, "My great grandpa was a
[N-word], my grandpa was colored, my uncle was was a negro, my pa was black, and I'm an African-American. That's the major difference between my great grandpa's life and mine."
Ethnic names are the most controversial. Many people object to the word Jew, although none of the members of the Jewish branch of my family tree feel that way about it. What else are they supposed to be? Hebrews? Israeli-Americans? They are absolutely flummoxed by the newfound political incorrectness of the Yiddish word
shvartze, which literally means "black person," the very term that is politically correct in English. They're struggling to find a replacement. They can't just say
Afrikaner-Amerikaner like we do because the Yiddish language community is not Americentric. Maybe they'll adopt whatever Hebrew word the Israelis use.
Some strident leaders of the "Latino" community have made a tempest in a teapot over what they wish to be called. When I was a kid in the Southwest they just called themselves Mexicans. "Sure, we weren't born in what is now Mexico, but we were born and still reside in what was once Mexico!" Then their children wanted to be called Chicanos, a word whose most authoritative etymologies I regard with suspicion but I can't offer a better one. As immigrants and their children with roots in Cuba and then all of Latin America turned the community into a miniature Melting Pot of "people with ancestry in Spanish-speaking Western Hemisphere countries," the federal government stepped in and labeled them "hispanic" with a lower case H, a word still enshrined in census forms and other government documents. The more strident "hispanics" rebelled at that one, "You're identifying us with the occupying armies that destroyed our own indigenous civilizations." Now the strident seem to want to be called Latinos with an L that is sometimes capitalized and sometimes not. Which is fine as long as they agree that the people of Brazil, the 600-pound gorilla of "Latin" America, are also Latinos because Portuguese is also a Romance language. As is French, the language of Haiti and Martinique, as well as Quebec and much of Louisiana. I can hardly wait to see Céline Dion and Buckwheat Zydeco perform at the next ALMA Awards!