You just justified to yourself a reason to use an even more controversial word out of the blue in a contrived way. I hope you were being intentionally ironic.
It's less controversial than the r-word, which is why it's a good analogy. People who insist that it's okay to say one usually insist that it's okay to say the other one, because they don't understand the ways words hurt people.
About a decade ago some prominent politician or other official was publicly excoriated for using "niggardly" correctly. I don't think anyone's lost their job for using "retarded" in its academic form.
>I don't think anyone's lost their job for using "retarded" in its academic form.
I could be convinced otherwise, but I believe that's a result of more people knowing not to use it, the same way you don't hear much about people getting fired for saying the actual n-word. "Person gets fired for saying technically correct word" is more 'newsworthy' than "Person gets fired for saying obvious slur".
