People throw around words, not understanding that they can negatively impact others. In Hope K.’s “What I Hear When You Say It,” it addresses this issue. She introduces to the audience how she feels when she took her peers call her brother “retarded.” Hope expresses how she would “despise certain friends” because they don’t take into consideration that words should not be taken as a joke.

The article states, “it is often the cruelest words that our memory stores for safe-keeping, to replay when we are finally feeling happy.” Words do hurt. Using the word “retard” to insult someone and have the victim take it as a joke is malicious. I hope that Hope has opened the world to understand the significance of taking words into careful contemplation, because she did so for me.