I don’t have many gen z people in my immediate circles, but something I’ve noticed online re-emerging in the last couple of years is the use of “retarded” as an insult.

I can’t definitively point to gen z as the culprits, I can’t really know who’s behind a username in most cases, it could just be that older generations have found their way to the parts of the internet that I inhabit, or may I’ve migrated to theirs as I’ve gotten older, or that overall attitudes have shifted, but it does sort of coincide with when I figured the younger half of gen z would be hitting the sort of “grown-up” internet.

Maybe I was in some sort of bubble, but for around a decade it felt like that was something we managed to mostly scrub from our vocabulary. It was honestly a little jarring to see it again, like I’d suddenly been transported 20 years back in time surrounded by assholes from my middle or high school.