Recently, a friend wrote me about
an idea he was puzzling over. It
concerned the language of disability.
The very word itself, he said,
was troubling--and I agreed. He wished
there were a term that "didn't even remotely imply 'substandard' or
'not,'" he wrote. He wished there
were "a different gestalt altogether."
(Gestalt! Now THERE'S a word!)
He's certainly not the first
person to raise these sorts of concerns. What's so great about the word "disability"? What was
so wrong with the word "handicapped"?
Is the word "cripple" still considered offensive?
In further explanation, he fleshed out this
scenario:
Wouldn't it be nice if people
thought
'There goes Ben, just like me'and not
'There goes Ben, I'm glad I'm not him'
Well, I couldn't disagree with
that!
In answering him, however, I felt
like he'd released a pent-up wellspring of ideas and yearnings. Every movement--perhaps every generation--has
gone through the undulations of nomenclature.
(Okay, maybe that's a bad phrase.)
For example, how did we go from "Black
is beautiful" to "Black" is not good, or at least not as good as
"African American"? How did
"gay" suddenly become LGBT (and now I'm told it's LGBTQA)?
All right, these are rhetorical
questions. I'm not so much interested in
the answers as the ideas behind those transitions. Are any words or terms intrinsically good or
bad, positive or pejorative, or is it just a matter of context?
I told my friend that his idea
was a good one for an essay, but that he might want
to flesh it out a bit. Perhaps provide
some linguistic history--for instance, I believe the oldest English word for
someone like me IS "cripple." Chaucer used it, I think.
It referred to someone who creeps along the floor (no doubt related to the word
"creepy").
Many folks I know object
to the word "disability" because it does sound so negative, yet at
least it has the advantage of being a term chosen by disability-rights
activists, as opposed to imposed upon us in patronizing fashion by
others. I don't love it, but I think it beats the treacly euphemisms such
as "differently abled," "physically challenged," or
"special needs."
On the other hand, I told
my friend, we all have bigger problems to worry about than language, don't we?
I think of this when I hear people use politically correct terms like
"gay" or "African-American" to say something disparaging
and most definitely not politically correct! Do words really change
attitudes? Not sure.
What do you all
think?
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