As a millennial, we grew up with the phrases "that's gay" and "that's retarded" (which meant the same thing) and obviously we had to learn to phase those out.

While I never once meant "that's disabled" or "that's homosexual"... We obviously don't say that stuff anymore.

Oh god I've got so many.

My latest one is remembering that you can't really fight fire with fire, unless you're being extraordinarily strategic about it. Attacking bigotry for instance, simply makes it stronger, as it feeds off strife and fear themselves. Remembering why Michelle Obama said when they go low, we go high. Not out of any great preference, but out of a lack of viable alternatives in her situation.

You can't actually "fight" it. You can exclude it. You can corral it. You can trick it into running itself off a cliff. But you can't actually destroy it by combating it directly, because it feeds off the combat, just like Trump does. You have to outmaneuver it.

I was totally headed down the alt right pipeline. Throughout highschool I was depressed and lonely. I lost my faith which sent me to the online atheist community which ran out of content, so they started attacking feminists/sjws. I also just distrusted women because I got molested as a child by one and no one took it seriously. This had primed me to just eat up all the content from the MRA/antifeminist crowd. The youtube algorithm, which at the time was absolutely unhinged, pushed me to racist content which I just parroted because I didn't know any better. I didn't understand why things were the way things were, but I was taught who to blame.

What saved me was getting friends. These friends shattered my preconceptions, which sent me to the library, which got me talking to more people, which got me reading more. By the time I finished high school I just became utterly incompatible with the person I used to be. I couldn't take back the things I said to people, but I could join their protests and speak up for them when I heard some heinous shit being said.

I no longer describe anything as 'lame' or 'retarded' or 'spaz' or their variants. It makes me sad ableism is so ingrained in even the most inclusive spaces even though the same argument has removed the use of 'gay' for the same reasons.

I also avoid dark or dry humour unless I'm confident the people I am talking to know it's absurdist and not a serious opinion. I don't always succeed at this.

In the 90s, anything bad was "retarded" or "gay". Those don't really fly anymore.

Gay people. When I was much much younger I remember telling a friend that while I didn't have a problem with people doing their own thing, I still didn't like gay people. My friend said I hope when you have kids they're gay. Guess what happened and how I feel about it now. I was such a dumb ass. When my kid came out to me I wept for joy at their bravery. I don't take hard stances on my opinions now and try to remember that my perspective isn't ultimate or necessarily right. There's always a chance that I'm wrong.

I was raised in a fundamental christian extremest environment and stuck with it for 30 years. I'm now a card carrying atheist.

Used to use the word 'retarded' to describe people doing dumb things. Then I realized that not only was it hurtful to people with Down Syndrome - it was inaccurate ... as a person with Down Syndrome would not do the things I was attributing to the phrase.

I take my coffee black, like my men. A line from the movie Airplane. My wife made me quit saying it, that servers today don't know the movie, and so it's just creepy instead of funny now. :(

Growing up in the 90s, we would always say things were 'gay' even though we had nothing against homosexuals. It was just the thing to say. Yeah, definitely should not have been saying that.

I used to be a full on incel, it's an easy hole to fall into if you hate yourself. I had to take a good look at myself and realize that I was the problem, and now I'm a far happier person

I don't have any regrets about making dead baby jokes when I was much younger, but definitely won't be making them now with an 8 month old daughter.

I've done ny best to shake out ableist, racist, and other harmful speech.

We may be able to speak freely but we are all held accountable for the words we say

I practice meditation quite seriously, but I stopped telling people I'm spiritual. I really am not interested in ghost stories, gods and angels at all.

I used to use “gay “ or “ retarded “ as negative adjectives, I no longer do because using someone’s being in a negative light is really mean, and I try not to be mean.

I used to play extreme music some 15 years ago and by God 80% of our humour was variations of calling each other f*gs. It's quite sad cause we didn't have an ounce of préjudice in us we were just wankers with dead end jobs and shit guitars. We met up with the boys a couple months ago and reminisced there was a lot of cringing...

Something rather cringe and obnoxious in hindsight was the over use of the word "ocd" It was quite common in media and in my circles for somebody to say "I'm so ocd" when referring to some perfectly normal thing they do like tidying bookcases and organising things.

It's pretty cringy now and I'd never say it now. I feel bad for saying it... but hey personal growth I guess. I was in school/college at the time too so it was a long time ago. There were a lot of things that were common at school that I used to say that are definitely not pc nowadays and I accept that. I don't pretend to be a perfect and morally righteous invidual. I have flaws as much as the next person

Racism.

While I was never into it myself thankfully, I let it pass a lot in my family. Being in university changed that though, it just feels too uncomfortable to have my family say racist shit in front of me while I have so many people of color as friends. I still struggle to call out their transphobia though but that is due to my own identity issues.

Grew up in the 80s and 90s. As progressive and openminded as I thought I was then...holy shit there are a lot of words and phrases I won't touch any more because they sound archaic, racist, mysoginistic, or hateful today. Back then they were perfectly acceptable everyday things no one would bat an eye at. It does make me happy that at least in this small arena we seem to have made progress as a society.

(Should add that this is from a US perspective)

I worked with someone who takes care of their older brother.

I don’t use the word “ret*rd” as a dig at someone anymore.

I honestly never used it as anything but playful banter but that word invokes a lot more meaning than I ever intended.

I know that now.

Nothing. Everything is still funny in the right or wrong context.

smoking. growing up in the 80s, everyone was smoking - in bars, restaurants, airplanes, even hospitals.

everyone I knew, their parents smoked tobacco or chewed tobacco. I started smoking myself, around 16 or so, as did all of my friends & even people I didn't associate with. it was just part of the culture - and yes, I was aware at the time that it was a dangerous activity, but kids are stupid.

and then around 15 years ago or so everyone stopped or switched to vaping. now I really only see homeless people smoking. it's quite the culture shift.

I never realized how frequently I called things “lame” until I said it in front of a coworker paralyzed from a motorcycle accident. Hopefully he understood, but it just took that one glance telling me he heard it for me to stop. To try to stop.

Misogyny in books. I was reading a Morse book. He described the woman of a couple from dyed hair to hammer toes but had no physical description of her husband whatsoever.

For a brief period in elementary school I used to think that's it's okay to litter - and not by example of my parents (they're fine) but rather because everyone else was doing it.

I'm not proud that I was doing it, but I'm glad that I quickly grew out of it - so much that it now makes my blood boil seeing someone on the street littering (almost to the point of me wanting to slap them across the face).

I know it's controversial, but moving away from "guys" when I address a group and more or less defaulting to "they" when referring to people I don't know.

They was practical, because I deal with so many students exclusively via email, and the majority of them have foreign names where I'd never be able to place a gender anyways if they didn't state pronouns.

Switching away from guys was natural, but I'm in a very male dominated field and I'd heard from women students in my undergrad that they did feel just a bit excluded in a class setting (not as much social settings) when the professor addresses a room of 120 men and 5 women with "Guys", so it just more or less fell to the side in favour of folks/everyone.

I played Modern Warfare 2 at 16. That's all I need to say. Not proud of my early internet years

Putting people down and using ableism as the punchline in a joke/retort/comment

I'm not as naive. There usually is no simple solution to complex problems and when someone suggest one it's almost always wrong by definition. It's a messy world and sometimes the right thing to do sounds counter-intuitive

Quite a few. I grew up in a conservative, racist family. It took me a long time to unwind the problematic casual phrases I grew up with. I'm not proud of it, and I occasionally cringe looking backwards. I realize now the tremendous weight and damage those phrases could do. Now I just try to be better day by day, and to make sure I don't perpetuate those damaging habits in my own children.

I used to slip in to a bit where I was sarcastically a character that took on beliefs basically the exact opposite of my own. I would make sexist or lightly racist (stereotype) jokes that I didn't actually believe but thought were funny. The jokes were ofter at the expense of myself or people like me but involved bringing up other races, sexes, and ethnicities.

I made an effort to stop doing this for a couple reasons. The first being that idk if I'm really good or really bad at sarcasm but a lot of people just wouldn't get my joke and I was afraid people actually believed that was who I was.

Secondly, I had a kid. I realized that she parrots everything I say and do, and she wouldn't understand the layers of the joke and could potentially become what I was making fun of.

I listen to a lot of comedians in podcast and I envy their ability to slip in and out of bits with other comedians knowing they all get it, but for now I make an effort to end that bit.

I remember as a teen in the 90s in high school, doing a fake gay voice was considered funny and nobody thought twice about it. Even if the person wasn't actually targeting anyone LGBTQ+ specifically, just doing the voice seemed to insinuate the somebody was less than masculine. Like, Oh, the water isn't cold enough for you, let me repeat that request back in a gay voice to make fun of you.

I'm pretty sure if I even tried doing a fake gay voice at work now I would probably be shit-canned pretty quickly, which in a way goes to show how far society has come in not tolerating what would've just been crude humor in earlier times. I know the LGBTQ+ community has worked for decades to get to where they're at today, but it still feels kind of crazy how quickly society changed.

Depends on the situation. In the corporate world I watch everything I say. When alone or with friends, not very much.

Don't beat yourself up too much for the behaviours and humor of your past. Times change, people grow. Sometimes a behaviour sticks, and thats ok too. We are still human.

"Rule of thumb" I quit using this one after learning that it referred to a rule where you could legally beat your wife with a switch no wider than your thumb.

"Getting gyped" Learned this one is about associating gypsies with getting screwed over, so people started saying they got gyped because something bad happened.

Stuff I thought was completely innocuous but turns out has really bad connotations, so I dropped them.

I stopped ironically wearing my Putin t-shirt.

Jokes built on racist stereotypes. Used to be just another part of my family's collection of jokes, but now I don't see the humor in those

I automatically reject any arguments based on the "human nature". We know jack shit about our nature.

I've been trying to degender my language. I grew up saying "thank you (or excuse me, yes/no, etc) sir/ma'am" and then being in customer facing positions for years just absolutely cemented that in my mind to the point where it is an absolute knee jerk reaction to make assumptions about the gender of others. It's an awful habit and makes me cringe every time I do it. I try to either just avoid the gender identifier ("thank you.") which to my mind sounds impolite, or use gender neutral terms like "friend" which REALLY sound impolite. It's tough but I'm working on it! The real trouble is getting my brain to stop gendering others and as a quite elderly millenial who actually identifies as Agender it is an annoying and difficult task. I'm envious of younger folks who won't grow up with these kinds of ideas as a default.

As a child, I kind of was pretty greedy and "bullied" my father for most of the time trying to buy the cheaper variants of food or clothing. Now that I know how hard it is to earn money, I really, really feel ashamed of myself for doing that bullshit. I must've put a good amount of stress on my father. I will repay him for all his hard work for me when I get a good paying job in the future. Love you dad!

I'm happy for your realisation, OP!

For me it was homophobic and ableist slurs as general words for "bad". It's very common in my native society, so after I started learning more about social justice issues, it took a few years to wean myself off.

Also, looking back, I realise now that in middle school I was lowkey cruel to some classmates, manipulated them for my own amusement. I was never one to bully others, but I was often a bystander entertained by others being bullied. (Even though I was being bullied myself by the same people on other occasions. But I somehow never made that connection with their other victims, I guess my empathy wasn't fully developed back then. Or maybe it was a mental self-defence mechanism, idk.)

For starters I don't listen to the band The Mentors anymore. Also I quit watching gory videos long ago and recently quit watching anything that gets me emotionally charged. So much on the internet serves no constructive purpose, it just riles up emotions. We've all heard "you are what you eat", the same goes for what you put in your eyes and ears

I was a huge Taylor Swift fan until she knowingly started dating a racist, sexist dirtbag. Dating someone with such views means you excuse those views. I was and am not willing to financially support someone with those views.

I also used to fly a whole lot. Probably once or twice a month on average. I developed a bad conscious about it and just stopped. I allow myself to fly if I absolutely have to (has happened twice so far), but otherwise I only travel by train or bus. My vacation destinations have changed quite a bit, to say the least.

When I was in middle school a friend of mine used to dress up and call herself a gypsy. Due to where we live, we didn't know that word was tied to a real life culture. We thought it meant fantasy-like hippies.

Years later I found out the actual meaning behind it and freaked out. Sadly I wasn't still in contact with her by that time, or I would've told her. Though her parents would've complained about it...

Making/laughing at jokes surrounding events like 9/11 and the titanic. Out of morbid curiosity, I know far too much about either of them now, they are no longer statistics, and contemplating both genuinely turns my stomach.

There is at least one pretty graphic recording of a phone call from a 9/11 victim trapped on the higher floors, the operator kept trying to reassure her, and it was obvious she knew they were lying. I can't anymore. I've deliberately traumatized myself listening to it, and I've lost my taste for that shit.

But, you know. "If we don't crack jokes, it gets too heavy." Ha-ha, holocaust /s

Some children Songs I could never sing vor hear again, they make me cringe a lot (racism, sexism, ...)

As I've gotten older (65M), I find that I have grown less hurried and hasty to judge.

Hurrying and rushing really doesn't help me to do anything faster or better, so why bother?

You do need to be able to quickly judge and assess people and situations in many settings and for a variety of reasons. That being said, I find that judging people prematurely can fail to appreciate their extenuating or particular circumstances. Everyone's got their own lives, problems and situations. For that matter, everyone can just have a crappy day. Doesn't mean you have to take crap from people, just helps to give the benefit of the doubt where and when feasible.

"if I were you". When I was younger I lack the ability really consider others' situation and put myself in their shoes. Not because I thought I'm better than them but thought I see a better way. I don't exactly remember when I stopped using it but I'm pretty sure it's around when I realized I would beat the shit out of me if I was my own child.

The same as OP

Tubular.

I've never encountered anything I would describe as "tubular." Except maybe tubes. It just doesn't feel right as general slang.

I'm mostly succeeding now at not calling another driver "he" by default. I don't know who they are, and can call them something better, as I just did.

I used to eat meat. Don't anymore because the arguments against it are just that fucking strong. Basically unless you advocate for religious supremacy it's hard to make a cohesive argument in favor of meat consumption.

"You got gypped"
Always just thought it was the same as being "ripped off" or getting a bad deal. Only in recent years realised that it was in reference to be swindled by a gypsy. I still wondered if the term gypsy was more to do with the lifestyle of the person, like a nomad, and not actually racist but no, gypsies origins are as Romani people. Have since stopped using the term.
Urban Dictionary has a bet each way as to if it is/was racist gypped/gyp't but best not to use it I think

Whenever I start saying "Easy Peasey..." there's always a slightly too long pause before I say "... lemon squeezey "

Enjoying anything. Everything is terrible. How dare I...? But seriously. Everything is terrible.

Can't think of too many, quite honestly. I don't buy into most of the bullshit these days. Moving the goalpost all the time doesn't change the underlying issues and yet that is all most people want to do - make a meaningless gesture to make them feel all warm and fuzzy inside even though nothing has changed.

Christianity.

Apple products. When it started to take away the ability to tune the noise cancellation feature on airpod pro, I decided that's it. You can nerf it to say its for the best interest for everyone. But I'm the consumer who paid full price who asked for the feature that was to isolate the noise, not a fucking compromised NC because you say so. You can at least have the decency to let me tune it myself, but no, Apple decides whats best. So fuck it.

Saying "I feel retarded"

Diet, lmao.

I don't use the word 'faggy' to describe things that are faggy but not in a homophobic way. I also don't eat squid or octopus.

Cruelty and violence towards intelligent creatures every single day until nearly my 40s.

Have casual conversations with other guys about girls appearance, it is a good way to start a conversation and get quick sympathy from other men. But is definitely not right.

I used to bother people about sexist humor. Turns out most of the time they just have bad humor or are following whatever was funny back when they watched TV. I don't do that anymore. It's not worth my time and it can easily turn a well meaning person into an upset and confused person. I just come up with a good and funny comeback and throw it into their face.

The country where I live had a score of 83.9/100 on the gender equality index, and I'm F29.

Chris cross is either going to make you some applesauce or make you jump jump.

One of my standard jokes pre-covid was that "well, you know, I've got politics. like a disease".

I stopped being racist and took up sexism as a healthy alternative.