That word used to mean "developmentally disabled" or something like that. Now it means "stupid people." Nobody thinks he meant to refer to children with learning disabilities. He meant "people who disagree with me." It's rude, and he definitely does look down on you if you don't think like him. We can be adults and just admit that.
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I have a godson who is DD, and while he wouldn't be offended, his parents might be a bit, if I were to use the word in any context. It used to mean simply "slowed." But reaching for politer words eventually poisons them. Reform School was a good enough name, but everyone soon figured out that it just meant "Kid's Jail (with lots of people thrown in that no one knows what to do with)." Up here the place was called the State Industrial School, the Youth Development Center, the Sununu Center and a few other things. Soon they were just SIS, YDC, and Sununu. Meaning unchanged.
Same with "Mentally Retarded" shortened to Retarded, Retard, and Tard over time. Schumer is old and it wouldn't have to be horribly offensive. Yet I don't notice that other old people get cut quite the same slack. Funny.
I told a friend of mine today that I didn't think this should qualify as forbidden speech, given that it was aimed at opinions and not people. He said, "Your opinion is developmentally disabled."
I'm with AVI: it used to mean simply "someone whose mental development has been (and is expected to continue to be) slower than the norm," which in itself was a euphemism for much blunter old terms. But all such words have to be changed constantly to address our own discomfort with the underlying judgment. Each new word, of course, fails to address the real problem and must itself be replaced.
We would like to think of ourselves as people who wouldn't be crass enough to deny basic humanity to someone whose mental processes were below average. Instead of becoming such people, we look for cheap grace in insisting that "developmentally disabled" is a nicer term to use. Soon, however, we'll be uncomfortable acknowledging that "disabled" implies that some kind of ability is valued, and therefore the status of dis-abled people is denigrated. An acronym is nice for a while.
The newest trend is to insist there must be no word for the condition at all, in an effort to pretend there is no such condition, because all judgments are wrong unless they denote political incorrectness, in which case nothing is too extreme--hence the effort to excuse Schumer for referring to bad conservatives as 'tards. In the meantime, we go right on hoping our own kids (and neurosurgeons) will be smart at whips.
I have a friend (she sang at our wedding 40+ years ago) who has been in Special Ed. for just about her entire teaching career. She recoiled 10 years ago when she heard me use the word "retarded". And she's not a "cancel culture" type of person. This is nothing new.
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