Trent: OCD seems to have become a new synonym for any kind of anal retention -- but you're right, just because someone's really anally retentive doesn't mean they have OCD. I don't have OCD (never been diagnosed with it), but I'm so massively anally retentive that there's a loud "Pop!" sound each time I get off the toilet seat.

But honestly, don't take it to heart. People often throw around medical terminology incorrectly just as a light hearted thing... I mean, if someone screws up and they go, "Aw man, I'm such a retard!", or if they're clumsy and go, "D'oh! That was spastic of me!", they don't mean it literally - it's just an expression. Remember that even the word "idiot" used to be a proper medical term for people with severe intellectual disabilities but it fell out of official usage around the early 20th Century - nowadays when people refer to someone as an "idiot" they don't literally mean someone who's mean diagnosed with a real actual intellectual impairment. It's just an expression.

And terminologies for mental/intellectual conditions change all the time, because usually once people start using the term in a broad general fashion, then the medical profession feels the need to change it so that people don't get it confused. That's what happened with the term "idiot" -- it became too commonly used to refer to people who weren't actually intellectually handicapped, so they changed it to "mental retardation", but now people can be called "retard" or "retarded" even if they're not diagnosed with a mental retardation, so they've changed that to "intellectual disability," and in a few decades that'll probably change to something else. Reading retardation is now called "dyslexia" and so on and so on.

When I was studying special education, at our very first lecture our professor just told all the students that because the terms keep changing and changing (and different countries use different terms too) -- he couldn't be bothered keeping up with the trends, so he told us that he was just going to stick with calling everything some kind of retardation and anyone an intellectual disability "retarded" and "retards" - because these were once proper terms (and still are in some parts of the world). He said that he was apologising now, at the first lecture, if anyone takes offence to it... but that's what he was going to use for the rest of the course. So consequently, in my mind, I just think of it all as forms of retardation and retards... and these aren't inherently bad words, "retard" just means to be slow or delayed (i.e. delayed cognitive/intellectual development), it's only because people started throwing the words around as insults that they became politically incorrect. When talking to people I'll try to use PC terms like "intellectual handicap" or "learning disabilities," but if I'm talking with other teachers where there aren't students or parents around, we'll just say "retard", "retardation" etc. We know that we're using the terms in their proper context and aren't aiming to offend anyone with it (it'd be similar to say dog breeders referring to their female dogs as bitches -- it's not offensive when used in the correct context).

But I can understand your frustration... it's like if you show any sign of being organised or structured or consistent then people reckon you're OCD, which totally isn't true. After all, just because someone is wheezing or out of breath doesn't automatically mean they're asthmatic; likewise just because someone is very structured and consistent doesn't mean they're OCD.