President Obama's enforcer Rahm Emanuel has been pulled up for saying 'retarded'. But the US has huge problems not using the word.

Rahm Emanuel, the ­famously foul-mouthed enforcer in the Obama administration, is learning the hard way the meaning of contrition. Not only has he been forced to apologise for his unfortunate use of the phrase "fucking retarded" in a recent West Wing meeting, but he has now invited a delegation from the Special Olympics to visit him at the White House to hear him take the "R-word pledge".

Had Emanuel realised the pickle he was going to get into, he presumably would have avoided using the expression in the first place. His verbal indiscretion, referring to an idea that he thought politically stupid, and revealed this week by the Wall Street Journal, incensed disability groups and gave Sarah Palin the chance to denounce him for his "slur on all God's children with cognitive and ­developmental disabilities".

The funny thing about this sorry saga, though, is how far the US is from eradicating the R-word from public discourse, in comparison with the N-word. Yes, there was a public outcry over the film Tropic Thunder, in which the phrase "a full retard" is used in reference to Ben Stiller's character. But it was nothing to the storm that erupted after Michael Richards' ­N-word tirade.

Remarkably, several local ­disability groups across the country still use the word in their literature. All of which lends substance to the efforts of the Special Olympics to eradicate the R-word from common parlance through its pledge, to which more than than 50,000 people have signed up (www. r-word.org). Its campaign site also includes a device that counts, with Google's help, the current number of uses of the R-word across the internet – at the time of writing it had reached 26,734.

Emanuel's comment probably ­accounted for a few thousand of those, though it's unlikely he'll be as trigger-happy in his choice of vocabulary in future.

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