Verified by 
Family members of people with disabilities wince at the casual, slang use of the term "retard" by friends and coworkers. We often talk amongst ourselves about how to address the frequent, thoughtless use by people in daily life.
Wednesday, March 2 saw the launch of a nation-wide effort to eliminate the use of the R-word called "Spread the Word to End the Word."
The campaign, sponsored by Special Olympics and The Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation for the Benefit of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities, encourages people to "pledge and support the elimination of the derogatory use of the r-word from everyday speech and promote the acceptance and inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities."
The website also offers tools to help people explain how the word, which was once a medical term, is pejorative, insulting and demeaning to people with disabilities.
It also notes that in this past October, President Barak Obama signed Rosa's Law, which removes the terms "mental retardation" and "mentally retarded" from all federal health, education and labor policy, using instead the terms "individual with an intellectual disability" and "intellectual disability" - both seen as people first language.
At this writing, the campaign had garnered nearly 172,000 online pledges.
