How many times have you referred to someone or something as “retarded”?

It’s OK to be honest. Many of us have done it, taken a word that means “slowed or delayed in development,” according to Webster’s, and used it instead to describe a person or situation that seems silly or disagreeable or chowderheaded.

“I hear it all the time,” said Greg Coni, a Parkland High School senior. “A lot of people, they just use it. It’s really not known too widely that it’s such a derogatory word.”

Now Coni and a group of his peers are joining a national campaign to change that.

It’s called “Spread the Word to End the Word,” an effort by the Special Olympics to get people to think about how saying “retard” or “retarded” in a casual or callous way can hurt people living with mental retardation and those who care for them.

Coni, president of the Parkland PALS, a social group for special and regular education students, is helping organize a series of events at his high school and in the community.

IT STILL HURTS

The R-word, as the Special Olympics is calling it, has dominated water-cooler chat recently.

And while the negativity behind the sentiment may not be aimed at someone living with an intellectual disability, advocates say it can still hurt.

Coni said he has plenty of peers who use the R-word around him. Those who know his sister has Down syndrome tend to apologize afterward.

“People have come to use it so freely with such a negative connotation that it’s really hurtful,” he said.

“If people would use it properly, I wouldn’t mind, but it’s the fact that it’s come to have such a horrible usage.”

Matt Wray, an assistant sociology professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, has researched terms such as “retarded” for his work.

NOT INSULTS

“Words like idiot and imbecile and moron, these words were coined at the beginning of the 20th century not as insults but as scientific categories,” he said.

Each of those words helped categorize people based on their IQ levels, he said.

The practice lives on, in a way, today. Pennsylvania, for instance, still uses “mental retardation” as a category when compiling statistics on special education programs.

But Wray said those old designations have metastasized over the decades.

“What starts out as an attempt to be objective and scientific in labeling gets caught up with popular ideas of stigma and the shame and the negative connotations that comes from those labels,” he said.

Some efforts to have certain words removed from the vernacular have seen success. Racial or ethnic terms, such as the N-word, are no longer used by many people.

Could adding the R-word to the list of socially verboten terms be a little much, though?

“Is this just the latest example of political correctness going amok?” Wray said. “My response to that is it’s less political correctness than it is human kindness and moral correctness and decency — that when someone asks you to stop using the word in their presence, that you comply.”

People who agree to stop using the word shouldn’t have much trouble finding alternatives, Coni said.

If they want to describe something as silly, for instance, they can just use the word “silly” and avoid the R-word.

“When people use (the R-word) every day,” he said, “they’re using it as if it’s negative. I don’t think many people think about how that sounds.”