I am well past the point where I have any grief related to my disability. Its a fact of life, a part of me, very much like not being able to fly, or having a nose above the mouth.
But there are of course situations in life where I feel that the world isn't always particularily accessible. But it doesn't help at all if someone uses appropriate language to explain to me that they dont want me as a customer because they are afraid of liabilities. Thats a bit cynical, I know, but thats another trend. With "awareness" about special groups comes more exclusion. Anyway, I digress.
While we don't have any problem with the term disabled, I can see some advantages to the "people first language" and try to use it when I can - but I agree it's often way more simple/clear to say "disabled", "blind", etc...
The advantages are :
- Including temporarily disabled people (maybe more in french than english). If you break your legs and spend a few months in a wheelchair, you might not feel legitimate to use the term "disabled" in comparison to someone who has never been able to walk and suffers more from it. I'd also add my personal story: I suffer from chronic pain that is very incapacitating in my life. I don't feel legitimate when I call myself disabled. It's not temporary, but it's not as clear as blindness etc... Using people-first language feels more right.
- Including more person means reducing stigma and reducing the gap between abled/disabled.
- Not letting that disabilty define you as a person. I am not disabled, I am Sunderw, a complicated person with many different aspects.
[Edit: formatting]
I would say "I am hungry" even if I have food in the fridge, I do not need to compare myself to poor starving people and decide to say "I am currently hungry" or "I am in a situation of hunger"
> Not letting that disabilty define you as a person. I am not disabled, I am Sunderw, a complicated person with many different aspects.
also I am still a complicated person and hungry does not define my personality.
> Including more person means reducing stigma and reducing the gap between abled/disabled.
Actually, taking too many steps to think of how to describe a person with a certain medical situation already increases the stigma, I would feel more bad if people try to avoid calling me "sick" so I don't feel bad about being sick, this is even worse.
Imagine calling a midget "A person with less height" or some nonsense like that.
But saying "I'm starving!" when you are just hungry is a bit different. It's fine where there are no starving people around. It's just a exaggeration then. But if one of your friends starved last week while you are still fat and just a bit hungry it might not sound well.
So for me your example does not count as a label. Is there no nuance at all between "being hungry" and "being disabled" in english ? If so, you're right, my argument does not stand.
> Imagine calling a midget "A person with less height" or some nonsense like that.
I think midget is pejorative so this is not a very good example. But I don't know much about that so I'll take your argument as if it wasn't at all.
I should have added that this is of course useful in some contexts. If you are talking to a specific person, then changing the language isn't very useful (except if this specific person feels the term is offensive, but that does not mean we should all change how we speek).
Where it is more useful, for example, is when you talk about limitations due to a problem. You are writing an article about height problems ? No need to say it's about dwarfism, there are other small people that might relate. You're a store and design a special help to get objects on high shelves ? No need to call it "dwarf help" or "midget help", but just "help for small people" or even "high shelf help".
In this case this is not about thinking about how to describe a person with a certain medical situation. It is about taking a step back and removing the medical situation altogether.
This applies much more to "deaf"/"hearing impaired" (or whatever, my argument is about generalizing, not about a specific term). A lot more people have difficulty hearing than are completely deaf.
Knowing about it is good. Trying to think about what your language implies is good. Forbidding the usage of words is obviously extreme and bad.
You can construct some armchair psychology arguments such as "the language explicitly acknowledges that there's more to a person", but does that really affect people's thinking in any significant way? And if it does, does it affect the thinking in the right way? Or does it trivialize the condition? No matter what language you use, being blind is a serious handicap and it really does affect what you can and can't do in this world; trying to euphemize the very real problems blind people face also isn't a good idea.
The flip side of this is that it allows / encourages others to see your disability as a mere "inconvenience" or something that should be able to be separated from you. I find at least for people I know with mental health disabilities they feel "person with X" tends to lead very quickly into "I know you have X but why can't you just be/do/deal with Y". In fact, I have a general theory (untested) that where someone with a disability falls on the "I am a person with X" vs "I am X" is probably directly proportional to how much X is a strong defining factor in their lives. I notice this particularly in ADHD and Autism spectrum disorders, where being on the "less support needs" side of the spectrum tends to be described as "I have ADHD / Autism" but being on the side of the spectrum that requires more suppoed "I am ADHD / Autistic" is more common. And for those I know who prefer the "I am X" format, part of that is because, paraphrased "this is a major part of my life that fundamentally alters how I live and interact with the world and I need people to understand that about me"
Obviously to a large degree this depends on your language having an adjective form in the first place e.g. we have yet to come up with "I am cancered", though in a related way we often. see "I am a cancer survivor" / "I am fighting cancer", but it's still relatively common even for bad cases to be "I have cancer".
I worked with someone who was really smart but annoyed me because his variable names were cartoon characters, like Tom,jerry,bugs, etc.
I asked him not to do this and he said that each variable was documented so it’s better to use an arbitrary label that never needs to change should the business change it’s name (ie if you called a variable division_names and the org decides to rename divisions to units). We argued over this and he never changed his variable names.
But now I get it. I’d rather just have some arbitrary label that means disabled and never have to change it as “prepend is foo” would stand the test of time while “prepend is disabled” might change to “pretend is of disability” might change to “prepend is not hindered by disability” to “prepend is a human first and valiantly overcomes a limitation in ability” to “prepend only has one arm” etc.
The euphemism treadmill has a long history. At some point cripple used to be the neutral term for many kinds of disabled. It's long been deemed offensive. Similar with idiot or retard.
Give it a few decades, and all of the 'people first language' will perhaps turn into neutral and then offensive, too.
(I am writing the above dispassionately. But given the generation I grew up in, I share your sensibilities about the words. 'Disabled' feels fairly neutral to me as well, and 'idiot' or 'cripple' feel somewhat offensive.
But I recognise that this is just an artifact of exactly when in time I grew up. And old people complaining about shifts in language and culture is an even older trope than the euphemism treadmill.)
None of this is going to change anyone's material conditions, it's just a distraction invented by well paid "diversity consultants".
At least the fad for "differently abled" seems to have died.
The latter group still tends to use “person with autism” and I think it’s more funny than anything but people get really pissed at people who developed this vocabulary without actually asking Autistic people what they thought of it.
I love the phrasing “person with autism” because it allows me to make a bunch of fairly accurate assumptions about the type of person you are, which is generally somebody who sees autism in a very paternalistic light. Why stigmatize the use of language where somebody self-identifies themselves as hostile to your interests and seeing themselves as being your woke saviour? What was that saying - don’t interrupt your enemy while they’re making a mistake?
In the eighties or nineties, people started to use the term as a slur. School children called each other "behindert" as an expletive.
This lead to a new term being used for the disabled: "invalid". Which in my opinion is the worst word you could use, since it origins in Latin and just means "unworthy". But it seems to still be in broad use.
It was also common (with no negative connotation whatever) to extend the term to people with mobility issues, to blind people, etc.
It has been replaced first by "disabile" (disabled) and later with the more politically correct "diversamente abile" (differently able) which is (IMHO) really terrible.
The latest euphemism is "persona con disabilità" (person with disability) which makes even less sense.
I sympathize with them a bit because it really is complicated. Why is saying “the blacks” bad, and “black guy” suspicious, but “black person” fine? Why is it ok to call someone disabled but not crippled? Why does saying the word “Jew” range so much in terms of offensiveness based on context and tone?
I know, from my perspective it’s kind of silly and not that hard too. But for people who are perpetually confused about things like that, I can totally see why they lean heavily towards the side of caution to avoid offense. Then of course there are the people doing it for performative reasons, but I’d wager a lot of those people are motivated by fear of saying the wrong thing or being branded a bigot too.
And it's odd! Because while there are certainly disabled people who prefer one form over another when they speak or when people refer to them (although again, in my experience, the overwhelming majority prefer the clarity of "disabled"), the only time I've ever run across someone making a universal dictate about how everyone should speak about all disabled people everywhere, the speaking has been non-disabled. And invariably backing a viewpoint which is tenditious at best among actually disabled people!
And to what end? It sometimes feels - certainly to my partner, hence her anger - an attempt to just sort of pretend the issue dosn't exist so that nobody has to be uncomfortable. Her disability is, at the moment, entirely incurable. She has experienced significant grief over her disability; she would love not to have it. But she does, and relabelling her as "differently abled" or a "person with a disability" doesn't suddenly remove the physical limitations she is struggling with.