BBC News: Viewpoint - Is it time to stop using the word "disability"?
"After running a campaign to urge toy manufacturers to include disabled characters in their collections, Rebecca Atkinson started to wonder if the word "disability" might also need a positive makeover.
Cripple, deaf-mute and lame all fell out of favour a long time ago and are now considered insults. By the 1980s and 90s "handicapped" was gradually replaced with "disabled" as a new way of thinking about disability emerged - called the social model. Attitudes change and as a consequence so does language.
Recently there has been a shift towards person-first language and now "people with disabilities" is often more popular in general usage over its predecessor "disabled people". I have noticed too that people in the disability community sometimes like to emphasise the "ability" part of the word with hyphens or capital letters: dis-ability or disAbility."
Language does evolve, but I doubt anyone has the ability force it to evolve in the way they want. UK posters with long memories will well know that the main charity devoted to cerebral palsy was the National Spastic Society. The inevitable result was that amongst kids, anyone deemed in the slightest bit physically or mentally deficient was dubbed "spastic," and this remains a contentious terms, much to the bemusement of our American cousins, for whom the word developed a much different meaning.
The NPS, of course, eventually changed it's name to "Scope," and what happened? Kids started deriding others as "Scopers" instead. Similarly, when the life story of Joey Deacon was publicised by the children's TV programme Blue Peter, its influence was not to generate sympathy and understanding as to add "Joey" to kids' pejorative lexicon, usually accompanied with crude impressions of his speech and mannerisms (for Americans, think Timmy in South Park).
No, we don't say "cripple" or "lame" (in that sense) anymore, but it is inevitable that when the "outdated" terms are purged, sooner or later their "neutral" replacements will, in turn, become "outdated" themselves. I think ultimately the problem is that what becomes "unacceptable" is anything that gives a hint of what it is actually describing, i.e. a deficiency.
Disability is, of course, a broad spectrum, and it seems that many people resent being included in it, wherever they're actually placed on it. There are also inherent contradictions, such as wheelchair users demanding greater and greater accommodation for them (which in many cases equates to a massive financial cost per individual benefitted), at the same time as vociferously maintaining that their lives are no less rich and fulfilled as everyone else's.
"After running a campaign to urge toy manufacturers to include disabled characters in their collections, Rebecca Atkinson started to wonder if the word "disability" might also need a positive makeover.
Cripple, deaf-mute and lame all fell out of favour a long time ago and are now considered insults. By the 1980s and 90s "handicapped" was gradually replaced with "disabled" as a new way of thinking about disability emerged - called the social model. Attitudes change and as a consequence so does language.
Recently there has been a shift towards person-first language and now "people with disabilities" is often more popular in general usage over its predecessor "disabled people". I have noticed too that people in the disability community sometimes like to emphasise the "ability" part of the word with hyphens or capital letters: dis-ability or disAbility."
Language does evolve, but I doubt anyone has the ability force it to evolve in the way they want. UK posters with long memories will well know that the main charity devoted to cerebral palsy was the National Spastic Society. The inevitable result was that amongst kids, anyone deemed in the slightest bit physically or mentally deficient was dubbed "spastic," and this remains a contentious terms, much to the bemusement of our American cousins, for whom the word developed a much different meaning.
The NPS, of course, eventually changed it's name to "Scope," and what happened? Kids started deriding others as "Scopers" instead. Similarly, when the life story of Joey Deacon was publicised by the children's TV programme Blue Peter, its influence was not to generate sympathy and understanding as to add "Joey" to kids' pejorative lexicon, usually accompanied with crude impressions of his speech and mannerisms (for Americans, think Timmy in South Park).
No, we don't say "cripple" or "lame" (in that sense) anymore, but it is inevitable that when the "outdated" terms are purged, sooner or later their "neutral" replacements will, in turn, become "outdated" themselves. I think ultimately the problem is that what becomes "unacceptable" is anything that gives a hint of what it is actually describing, i.e. a deficiency.
Disability is, of course, a broad spectrum, and it seems that many people resent being included in it, wherever they're actually placed on it. There are also inherent contradictions, such as wheelchair users demanding greater and greater accommodation for them (which in many cases equates to a massive financial cost per individual benefitted), at the same time as vociferously maintaining that their lives are no less rich and fulfilled as everyone else's.
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1O1i5qP
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