No matter which terms are politically correct at the moment, they still contain the same connotations of describing people as being somehow DIFFERENT. And whatever words are being used now will be replaced in a few years with other words but in reality they will all mean the same thing. Once a word has been in the lexicon for a while it starts to take on negative connotations and then we replace it. There was a time when no one considered the word "retarded" to be offensive-it's just a word really- but as people started to use it in a negative context, that's when it had to be replaced. It's the word itself, but how comes to be used over time. Is the word "disabled" any better? I don't think so, it still implies that someone is different and is inherently negative (dis) but people don't use it to be mean to other people-at least not yet-which is why we can use it. But as you see even "disabled" is falling out of favor and is slowly being replaced by more positive terms like "differently abled." But it's all still used to convey the same thing.

In the 70s, people started making jokes about "Pre-menstrual Syndrome"- it became trivialized, so the medical community changed the name to Premenstrual Disphoric Disorder in order for it to be taken more serious. In reality the 2 are the same thing, but PMS became so trivialized in the popular vernacular that it now is used to describe a lesser degree of PMDD.

When I was college the politically correct term for anyone who wasn't white (european-american) was "people of color" (are people still using this btw?). Look at the words- in reality, how is it any different than the term "colored people"? It really isn't, it's just our PERCEPTION of the words that are different. We hadn't-yet- associated "people of color" with anything bad, and it has a more positive undertone of "diversity" (which is offensive to non "people of color" because then they become "colorless people," ie uninteresting people...I digress). Anyway, what I'm saying is, they're all just words until people use them to the detriment of others and then we replace them with slightly different words that basically convey the same message in and of themselves. Therefore we should all just use the words that currently have the least negative associations and leave it at that. In the end it's people's intentions of how they are using the word and what they perceive the word to mean, and everyone just has to be aware that their perception may be different than someone else's and try to speak/write accordingly.