I apologized and caveated my statement but I guess people didn't see it or are choosing not to acknowledge that fact. It is virtually impossible to not offend someone with nearly anything a person says nowadays. So many terms have been twisted to mean derogatory things when they truly are only a description of a condition. Being retarded is one of those. It is simply describing that something or someone is slowed for one reason or another. It was originally used to describe people with mental handicaps because their mental development is slowed. They are mentally retarded. People have twisted it to be viewed as a negative but it is still simply a description of a person with slowed mental development or understanding. ***** is another of those terms. It's original use was to describe something as being strange or odd. If you didn't feel well, you might say you felt *****. However, it has been twisted to be a derogatory term for homosexual people. If I didn't feel well and told someone I felt ***** I would get all kinds of grief even if I was using the word in its original context and not to degrade homosexual people. If folks can't understand that I was using the word retarded to indicate that some posters seem to be slowed in their mental capacity to understand that the topic they were discussing had been exhausted of original comments then so be it. I did not intend to start this crap storm and I certainly never even thought about people with mental handicaps when I made my statement. Folks need to thicken their skins and maybe think about the original use of words and the context in which they are being used currently before they try to cover folks in hot tar and feathers and run them out of town on a rail.
EDIT: See! I can't even type the word Q U E E R in a post without it getting censored, even though I was not using it in any sort of negative way! This is one of the major problems with our society and I am not upset with Freak or the Mods either. It is just to world we live in that words have been twisted and if someone uses them to mean what they originally meant then they are a bigot and insensitive. Well I'm not and I'll continue using words to mean what they are meant to mean.