“Retarded” as been used three times in the past six months aloud in my office: “That’s retarded!” “He’s so retarded!” “I’m not a retard!” Each time, the word flew right out of a cubicle, clear and loud, for all to hear.

Anyone older than 5 could imagine many words that would cause quite a stir – not to mention a lawsuit – if they flew with such abandon right out of cubicles. “Retarded” and “retard” don’t seem to be among those words.

I Googled the word and turned up some 18 million hits (down from more than 19.1 million when I Googled it two years ago, so that’s progress). Hits have included a band with the name, “retarded animal babies,” and “movie criticism for the retarded”, which on Google scored right ahead of “Declaration on the Rights of Mentally Retarded Persons”, so that’s progress.

Jill and I often think of how Alex looks to other people: on the street, in restaurants, at the airport and on the bus and the subway. Many people still look at Alex. Sometimes Alex notices them, sometimes not. Sometimes he answers them in a somewhat appropriate way if they ask him a question; sometimes not. “That’s the way they communicate,” one woman said to me once in a McDonalds, meaning autistic people, about whom she seemed to know something; I somehow thought it a kind observation, though I was just guessing.

Alex is a nice-looking kid. Dark hair and eyes. A killer glance when he makes eye contact. Slim, downright skinny; it’d be hard for most people older than 5 to see him as any kind of threat.

Not like the time an “older” guy from a special-needs high school in Ned’s school building got into Ned’s first-grade classroom. “He ran in and sat on the teacher’s chair,” Ned recalls, adding that he himself hid under his desk until somebody came and fetched the young man. A few days after that incident, when Jill picked Ned up from school, Ned’s teacher said Ned was great when the guy came in, telling her not to be scared and that the guy was just “sensitive, like my brother.” I like that somebody else had to tell me this about Ned, and I especially like that S word.

The New York Times reported yesterday that marketers are showing increasing support for the disabled. Special Olympics is also taking pledges from visitors against hurtful language (“Spread the Word to End the Word”).

Are people with autism trapped in their own world? Or are the rest of us just trapped in ours?

asks Tara Parker-Pope on the New York Times, regarding the the Wired magazine article on autism featuring Amanda Baggs and Michelle Dawson.

Parker-Pope asks a chicken and egg kind of question about autism: Is it a disease and a disability? Or is it a difference, a different way of being human? And who decides—autistic persons themselves, “experts” in autism, those who live with autistic persons—or who should decide?

Writes Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing about the Wired magazine article on autism featuring Amanda Baggs and Michelle Dawson:

The article looks into the long-held belief that autism and retardation are tied together and concludes that this just isn’t true — rather, that people with autism have been incorrectly classed as retarded for generations.

Yes.

It’s very obvious to me why people would think my son is mentally retarded; his academic performance and testing reveal this. But anyone who’s spent any time with Charlie knows that—-while he is very limited in his speech and while it often takes a long time (minutes, hours, days) for him to understand things that are said to him—-he doesn’t just look smart, but he is. Charlie’s very attuned to all that is said and done around him; he has an innate sense of direction and a strong memory. He needs a lot of help to navigate the world, whether looking both ways for cars or listening for his name to be called; he’ll very likely always need a lot of supports. He’s neither a genius nor a savant.

And he’s been smart enough to teach me that there’s a whole other way of being and understanding and processing the world—something I was more than ignorant of before getting to know a boy named Charlie.

Go here to read Wired’s article, The Truth About Autism: Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know. The article closely profiles Amanda Baggs—-who notes that “‘I don’t fit the stereotype of autism. But who does?’”— and Michelle Dawson—-who says “‘There’s such a variety of human behavior. Why is my kind wrong?”‘.

And some words by Mike Merzenich, a professor of neuroscience at UC San Francisco:

Mike Merzenich…….says the notion that 75 percent of autistic people are mentally retarded is “incredibly wrong and destructive.” He has worked with a number of autistic children, many of whom are nonverbal and would have been plunked into the low-functioning category. “We label them as retarded because they can’t express what they know,” and then, as they grow older, we accept that they “can’t do much beyond sit in the back of a warehouse somewhere and stuff letters in envelopes.”

And I know one boy who struggles to talk and to read and to answer the question “who many crackers?” after he’s just counted out what’s on his plate: He’s a boy who, too, has been learning the A and D strings on the cello, and who—pointing out the window and calling out “this way, this way”—shows he knows his way up and down New Jersey highways. People might call him retarded and he has a lot of challenges and impairments, and a lot more smarts than you or I can tell.