[HN Gopher] 'Disabled' is not a bad word. Stop telling people wi...
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'Disabled' is not a bad word. Stop telling people with disabilities
it is
Author : Anthony-G
Score : 46 points
Date : 2022-04-26 18:51 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.irishtimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.irishtimes.com)
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| At the risk of getting downvoted for sarcasm...
|
| "Stop"? That's harsh "Tellling?" That excludes people who are
| unable to talk "People?" Whoa, aren't we constantly going on
| about animals and even plants being sentient creatues?
|
| So "differently continue communicating to sentient creatures"...
| Oh wait, creationism? ...
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Did someone ever work out the relevant academic theory that
| describes this linguistic process?
|
| A word starts out as neutral, but gradually transitions to
| becoming a slur (a process that seemingly takes decades), and is
| replaced by a new politically correct word which is seen as too
| avant-garde at first, but gets established in part due to a lack
| of push-back (because any criticism will make the person
| levelling it seem a bigot/racist/ass), and eventually that
| becomes the default word, until it starts sliding into slur
| territory and the cycle starts anew.
|
| I'm not sure if this process can actually be prevented.
| jeherr wrote:
| I definitely recognize this process (and have heard the term
| euphemism treadmill from McWhorter the other commenter pointed
| out) but since when has "disabled" been used as a slur? I'm
| sure it's happened, but I'm not sure I've ever heard of someone
| using disabled in a derogatory manner like you would hear
| "retarded" commonly used now.
| chillacy wrote:
| I get the sense that "disabled" is still in its avant-garde
| phase. "retarded" passed that in my circles maybe a few years
| ago, but also there was a time where it was much like
| "disabled" is today.
|
| Aside, somehow "retarded" got replaced by "special needs" or
| "short bus" in some circles which also sounds insulting to
| me, so maybe we'll continue this treadmill for awhile longer.
| jfengel wrote:
| "Short bus" was always a slur.
| paxprose wrote:
| this button is disabled this button is retarded this button
| is special needs
|
| I could go with the first two in a code review.
| krnlpnc wrote:
| And then you could go explain that second one to HR.
| adamomada wrote:
| It's the French translation
| tempnow987 wrote:
| Where I am disabled is not in common use.
|
| Differently abled is OK. Learning differences or special
| needs also works. Disabilities I think is still OK.
|
| I'm kind of on board with getting away from retarded and
| disabled.
| bananarchist wrote:
| John McWhorter refers to it as the Euphemism Treadmill but I
| can't say if it's a widely accepted term in the field
| Someone wrote:
| I think the treadmill aspect also happens for words used by
| teenagers. They use, for example, "hip". Once their children
| are teenagers, they don't want to be like their parents, so
| they use "hot". Their children, in turn, pick yet another
| word, making "cool" the new "hot" (chances are I'm not
| mentioning these in the historically correct order)
|
| The same process seems to apply to social networks ("Facebook
| is for parents")
|
| In all these cases, there's a mechanism that makes a word or
| product tabu within certain social circles, forcing them to
| come up with a new term.
|
| The process that leads to things becoming tabu stays,
| however, so the cycle repeats itself.
|
| I wouldn't know what it would be, but it wouldn't surprise me
| if there were a more generic term that applies to all of
| these.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's kind of like unending administrative bloat.
|
| Realize that there are people making a living off of trying to
| find new things to be offended by.
|
| Once you realize that, the world starts to make a lot of sense
| :)
| [deleted]
| KSPAtlas wrote:
| Meanwhile, in Polish, the official word for a black person
| (Murzyn) sounds like a slur
| RichardHeart wrote:
| Agree completely, and there's all kind of other adjectives
| getting the same treatment!
| david-gpu wrote:
| "Differently abled" makes me think _" yeah, the difference is I'm
| unable to do certain things"_ every time.
|
| The universe is not balanced and fair. It didn't give me
| something in exchange for what it took from me, and that is okay.
| wcarron wrote:
| Indeed, I've sometimes had the possibly insensitive but joking
| thought, "Differently abled? What abilities are they hiding? If
| timmy gets his legs crushed by a bus, can he fly?! Can he now
| shoot lasers from his nipples? As far as I'm concerned sick
| triceps from wheeling along don't count as an ability."
| threads2 wrote:
| Jokes like this are differently abled
| wahern wrote:
| It would work better as stand-up comedy, when expectations
| are differently calibrated.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| It also fits better into the social model of disability, which
| I find very valuable, and assigns agency to the disabling where
| it belongs.
|
| Ex: I don't experience my poor vision as a disability right
| now, because I'm easily able to access an aid that allows me to
| do everything I want to with no major downsides, in the form of
| glasses.
|
| But if I were to become direly impoverished and lose access to
| them (again lol), I would be _disabled_ by that circumstance.
| My physical state has stayed the same. The disability is in
| what I can 't access and why, not the impairment itself, which
| can be addressed.
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