Inconsistency has its ups and downs.

Note the text in the lower right corner.

A worker in Dubai was denied the vacation time he requested so he committed suicide by jumping off the tallest building in the world, the Kahlifa Tower. He leaped from the 147th floor.
If I were going to commit suicide (I'm not) by jumping I sure wouldn't pick the tallest building in the world. WAY too much time to think about it before it's over. Imagine falling 47 of those stories and then thinking, "Wait a minute! The second week in August would work just as well."
Now what do you do?

Speaking of crossing the Rubicon, the plan is to put a new wiring harness in Ilsa. So as part of the body-off prep I am cutting out and removing every piece of wire in the car. Do you have any idea how many wires of all sizes that is? A little spooky. The rat's nest of wires in all colors and gauges laying on the floor of the garage, wires that do everything from power the wipers to turn on the blinkers to create the spark in the cylinder heads looks up at me and says, "Well, ace, you've done it now."

Lebron James is in some trouble. At a press conference after their last game a question was asked of his teammate about a foul that dislocated an opponent's elbow. James gave his opinion of the question in a voice that wouldn't have been heard save for the microphone in front of him, saying, "That's retarded."

I'm old enough to remember when that wasn't a derogatory or insulting term. We had a classmate in our Sunday School, Gale, who was retarded. We all knew he was retarded and it was OK with everybody, including Gale. He told us about the special school he went to in Mukilteo. (This was long before special needs kids were mainstreamed.) But he was home on weekends and even as 5th grade boys, famous for insensitivity bordering on cruelty, he was fully accepted in our Sunday School class. When others, including us, referred to Gale as retarded it meant exactly what the word means; he was slow.

Those of us who have been involved in music are used to seeing that term, typically with it's Italian spelling (most musical terms are Italian) - ritard. It just means "slow down."

I've often used the expression, Language is as language does. When a word or phrase is spoken what does the hearer understand it to mean? I remember in some college class I took learning that communication involves

• the intent of the speaker, 
• the words actually spoken,
• any corruption occurring in transmission (e.g. background noise that obscures a word, etc.)
• the hearing of the receiver (husbands have trouble hearing higher pitched tones),
• the mindset of the receiver and, 
• the meaning he assigns to those words due to his mindset. 

That last step is the most critical. It doesn't matter what I meant to say or what I said. What determines the outcome is how they received it. And their reception will almost always be colored by their mindset.

That's why I've had to learn to avoid the use of retarded. Fifty years ago it just meant slow, as in a slow learner, or someone whose developmental process has been slowed relative to others their age. Gale. No judgmental overtones whatsoever. Now, for reasons I don't understand, it has become a derogatory term. If language is what language does, it's no longer appropriate for me to refer to someone as retarded, regardless of my benign intent.

[Note: yes, it was used derogatorily back then, as when a boy referred to his buddy who thought Suzy was cute by saying, "Man, you're retarded. She's ugly!" But at least in theory the same thing could happen today with, "Man, you're special needs. She's ugly!" OK, it doesn't have quite the same ring to it, but you get the point.]

Language is a dynamic, not static thing.
cf. gay, bad, laptop and digital (except for men over 40)
But sometimes it's hard to keep up.

A case could be made that China is the most powerful nation on earth, not in terms of military might but in total influence across a wide variety of areas, incl. financial markets, manufacturing, international influence (they own sub-Sahara Africa) and the like. So I found this article very interesting:
Growing calls to change the one child policy