Things You Just Can't Say Anymore

On Sundays, I often drag out old material from the archives, since there are fewer people on the 'net, and I'm spending a lot of time working on my "Reviewing the Mail" post for Monday morning. This is one of those times.


I wrote the following, which abruptly ended a thread about the average intelligence of various racial groups, on the Straight Dope Message Board back in 2000, replying to someone else's cite of a serious scientific paper from 1866:

Man, I really miss the days when you could title a serious scientific paper "Observations on an Ethnic Classification of Idiots" and get away with it.

Just being able to use the word "idiots" in a clinical sense would be wonderful:

"Your diagnosis, doctor?"
"Mr. Smith, I won't lie to you...your son is an idiot. He scored a 95% on the moron scale, has an well-developed feeb factor, and is probably the purest textbook case of nincompoopery that I've ever seen."