ixnay on ableist language

[piranha]

spurred by a post from the ever-thoughtful coffeeandink i think it's time that i attack my own ableist language. for example, i use terms such as "lame" and "dumb" to disparage myself, and i believe i should stop. not with the disparaging, mind, but with side-swiping disabled people while i am doing it.

i'd never call a person with a disability "lame" or "crippled" to their face (or behind their back, or even just in my mind), and i thought that was good enough. i also used the justification that those terms i liked best were outdated. but i missed the fact that they still carry their history, and that people who're living with a disability are often all too aware of the history and of its remaining echoes, and how that affects their treatment today.

saying "that was a lame excuse", or calling some software "cripple-ware", or using metaphors such as "the government remains deaf and blind to the plight of native peoples" still support society's negative attitudes and often false beliefs about disability. and why in the world should disabled people be designated the go-to folks for us temporarily abled folks expressing the particular suckiness of a situation? that seems quite wrong to me. and it goes deeper than being wrong because it hurts their feelings; it's also wrong because it reduces them to this one sucky thing, and because it gives altogether a false impression of what living with a disability is like.

while it'll take some getting used to (old habits are hard to break), i don't consider it a hardship to do without those terms -- it's not like english has a shortage of colourful words if i really feel moved to insult. heck, it could be a fun challenge to come up with good ones that don't put down an already disadvantaged group.

here's my starting list of words to no longer use to disparage something or somebody: blind, crazy, cretin, crippled, deaf, dumb, idiot, imbecile, insane, lame, moron, paranoid, psycho, retarded, schizo, spaz, stupid, using something as a crutch. please call me on them if you notice a slip-up. and you might consider your own use, at least in my journal. i am not gonna police them, but i appreciate mindfulness and support for a habit change.

i don't doubt there are more words like that; feel free to share any you think are problematic, and why. i am consolidating comments on dreamwidth because i want to keep them all in one place for this.

Comments

[redbird]

I don't know if this is even indirectly spun off the Wiscon panel discussion, but in that conversation, someone (maybe jesse_the_k?) pointed out that a crutch is a good thing: it's not the problem, it's part of a solution, or can be. Yes, the metaphor is about overreliance or laziness, but we should reclaim the concept of a crutch: it's a tool that helps people get places or do things when they otherwise might not be able to. (From a certain angle, most tools are such: if it's reasonable to use an automobile for mobility, why not a couple of shaped pieces of wood?)

a crutch is a tool

[piranha]

there was a wiscon panel on this? oh! i didn't know. do you know whether anyone wrote up notes?

definitely, a crutch is a tool, and a useful tool -- just like eye glasses and hearing aids. and yet, nobody uses glasses and hearing aids in the same negative sense (yes, there are insults about them, but nothing comparable to "you're using your religion as a crutch", i think). i wonder why that is. is there something more ... primal about mobility? for me there is, but i don't know whether that's a common thing.

Re: a crutch is a tool

[eagle]

It may just be that crutches are way, way older than eyeglasses or hearing aids, giving the language more time to go through semantic drift. That transformation of term (from a specific concrete object to a fuzzier metaphorical concept that's related to the use of the object) is apparently extremely common and natural in languages, and crutch is a very old word (goes back to Old English).

Re: a crutch is a tool

[redbird]

History of tech digression: I know what you're getting at, but eyeglasses are quite old enough to have left room for semantic drift: they've been around at least since the middle ages (possibly earlier outside Europe, but certainly by the 15th century in Europe [I'm working from memory and am fuzzy on whether it's "14th century" or "1400s"]).

The earliest microscopes used lens-making techniques borrowed from opticians. Bifocals are a couple of hundred years old.

Re: a crutch is a tool

[eagle]

Yeah, I mixed two things with much different time scales (history of crutches and history of the word) and realized it somewhat after I posted it. Eyeglasses are plenty old (always older than I expect, but I was sort of vaguely aware of that). For crutches, I was partly thinking of how they go back in myth at least to Oedipus and the riddle of the sphinx and have existed probably for about as long as people have. That, of course is meaningless for semantic drift in English, hence the confusingly incorrect part of my comment. But does open the possibility that English got the word complete with existing extra connotations.

I think 14th century may still be relatively recent compared to crutch as a word in English, which may date back as far as the beginnings of Old English in the 5th century given the similarities of the word to a word in Old High German. But I don't have an etymological dictionary that can date it, and glasses certainly have been around for a while as well.

Re: a crutch is a tool

[redbird]

Program item 38, "Rethinking Disabling Metaphor," panelists Jesse the K, Deanne Fountaine, Elise Matthesen, Sandy Olson, and Georgie Schnobrich. I posted a little about it as part of one of my Wiscon posts:

The panel on "Rethinking Disabling Metaphor," on the ways that casual use of terms like "lame" or "crazy" as all-purpose dismissals of people and ideas can both be painful to some people who hear them, and create or reinforce prejudices, was good. The moderators had to remind a few people of the focus of _this_ panel, that similar uses of, say, "that's gay," were beyond the scope of what they were trying to do in 75 minutes. But some good ideas were shared; one useful thing the moderators did was point out that you can't just tell people not to use idioms or metaphors, you need to provide and use different ones. So they collected a few from other categories: for example, that an idea is half-baked or doesn't hold water.

I think there was at least one write-up in either the LJ or the DW wiscon community.

Re: a crutch is a tool

[aquaeri]

In addition to redbird's comments, I read at least one, if not two review posts about this panel. I thought one of them was by badgerbag (who does frighteningly extensive wiscon panel writeups) but I can't find it at the moment. I'll figure out how to use the magic dreamwidth time machine so I can see my reading page the week after wiscon, because I'm pretty sure that's where and when I saw those posts. And I honestly thought that Wiscon panel and ensuing discussion around here was the reason you were onto ablist language.

I know it's also something sqbr concerns herself with but she didn't go to wiscon (although she might have discussed it with someone who did).

I'm floating around in the "starting to care about this issue"-o-sphere. One thing I've decided is important for me is getting rid of labelling (insulting and belittling) people, and focussing on actions and ideas. Not that that will necessarily make everything okay :-) but it's a useful mental exercise for me to try to think that way.

One of the Wiscon suggestions was "half-baked" for bad ideas and I immediately decided that when confronted with bad ideas poorly reasoned, I could say/write "that's not just half-baked, you haven't even got the right ingredients together". I don't want (anymore) to call bad ideas names that imply mental impairment, because most people I've met who had mental impairments do not (or could not) come up with the kind of spectacularly bad ideas I most want to be scathing of, and it's best to leave them well out of the argument.

One thing I wonder about the metaphorical associations of crutches vs glasses is: it's often bookish/academic bodies that use glasses. However physically decrepit, they often have high social capital from their bookish/academic tendencies.

Re: a crutch is a tool

[piranha]

no, wiscon had no direct influence on me -- i've been thinking about "lame" for quite a while, and then when i ran into coffeeandink's post, that set me to making a decision about my questionable language. neither of the people you name are on my reading list.

now, coffeeandink's post might have been caused or inspired by the wiscon panel; that wouldn't surprise me at all.

the google has, as always, been helpful, and i found two writeups of said panel, Rethinking Disabling Metaphor:
http://sasha-feather.livejournal.com/309425.html
http://sophy.livejournal.com/1186437.html

apparently elise was on the panel. :) i haven't seen anything by her at all on it -- but it sounds like she has her plate overly full, so that's no surprise.

Re: a crutch is a tool

[aquaeri]

Yes, I think it's reasonably likely coffeeandink is following on from Wiscon. Yay for google! I think those two would be the posts I read, although I'm not sure how I got there from here (I'm not subscribed to them either) so it would have been a long hard slog for me to find them via the routes I had in mind.

All credit to Sasha for the good crutch

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks to submarine_bells, I've found this thread. 'Twas sasha_feather who came up with the "good crutch" metaphor, which I just adore!

Words can't express my glee at seeing this topic discussed in so many places, though that doesn't stop me from trying.