If you were considered “special” it was because you were, well, stupid. If you just couldn’t hack it with the “normal” kids, for whatever reason (usually something completely out of your control), adults said you were “special”. That was so you didn’t feel bad about yourself, to try to keep up your self-esteem and all. But kids are a lot sharper than many adults give them credit for, and they pounce on stuff like this. Kids are also really cruel, because when you’re young you want to be just like everybody else, but being different in ANY way is grounds for ridicule. So, if you weren’t as quick on the uptake as everyone else, instead of using specific in-your-face insults, your fellow classmates would go passive-aggressive and call you “special”. This was not good. Nobody wanted to be special; it meant they were thought of as dimwits, incapable of figuring out the simplest of things.
Remember “Special Ed” classes? (Do they even have these anymore, or have they been given another name?) These were the classes that all the average and above-average kids avoided like the plague. Sometimes there were reasons you could be “sent” there, usually as a punishment: misbehave and you’d get sent to Special Ed. (My parents used to “threaten” us with Catholic school if we misbehaved!) This was a completely different kind of torture than the Principal’s office, Study Hall or Detention. Developmental or learning disabilities be damned, being sent to Special Ed was bad news.
Hitler used “special” in an extremely bad way: “special treatment” was the term the Nazis used for the murder by gas of millions of “undesirables”. Hollywood, however, has shown how the word is really used: in the 1988 version of “Hairspray” by John Waters, Ricky Lake’s character Tracy gets sent to Special Ed simply because her hairstyle annoys people. Her initial reaction is nothing but teenage bluntness: “But that’s for retards!” In the film “Welcome to the Dollhouse”, Heather Matarazzo’s character Dawn is shocked to learn her “special people” club means it’s “for retards.” Even Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady” character from Saturday Night Live used the word “special” in a derogative sense, albeit not so damaging. Her phrase “isn’t that special” was a soft, safe way of saying “isn’t that weird/strange/annoying/ [insert other appropriately negative adjective]”. The word is just not considered positive anymore.
You’d think we would have learned this by now. Unfortunately, people are still calling their children’s art projects “special” and wondering why they glare at them in return. Isn’t that special?