Pretty on the Outside, Ugly on the Inside

Jennifer Aniston lost me forever when I found out she used the word "retard" on a talk show. She's so pretty and her hair always looks great and I imagine she always smells really good and I wholeheartedly back her original statement about women having kids on their own and her subsequent rebuttal to Bill O'Reilly, but now my image of her is tainted.

It is never ok to use this word. I don't care if you're a brain surgeon with three degrees from Harvard, when I hear you use that word, I'll think you're uneducated, ill-bred, and unobservant, not to mention insensitive, uncaring, unfeeling, uncouth, crass and cold. There's no quicker way to show me what kind of person you are than to casually drop that word into conversation.

I don't want people to stop using this word so they can be politically correct or so my stomach doesn't turn everytime I have to hear it. I want people to want to drop it from their vocabulary because they come to an understanding of how horrible it is to throw that word around when the fact is that it's a derogatory term for retarded people. It's mean and ugly and hurtful to make fun of or make light of people that, through no fault of their own, were born with mental disabilities. Have some character, some integrity.