Guest post: Especially zogborst
Originally a comment by latsot on Don’t call me a basket case.
I found the forbidding of ‘blind’ as in ‘blind study’ especially zogborst.
As a disabled person and wheelchair user I find that words don’t matter nearly so much as attitude. Blind people know they’re blind and if I ever forget I can’t walk it’s going to hurt when my face bounces off the deck. We’re generally not shy about our disabilities or embarrassed about them. We’ll joke about them and are happy for others to do the same providing, as tigger said, the intent is humour rather than abuse. My friend Henrietta, who some of you might know from Twitter, is paralysed from the chest down and has the biggest collection of unfortunate wheelchair accident gifs I’ve ever seen. She finds them hilarious. She’s right, they are. It’s a mixture of “yeah… done that” and “he totally deserved it”.
Those I’ve spoken to about this agree that we’d much rather people be straighforward than mangle language without ever actually consulting us. It feels performative and it makes me personally feel as though I’m expected to be grateful.
A couple of illustrations about attitude:
I’m asked very often why I’m in a wheelchair. I don’t mind this at all and I don’t think it’s rude… providing I’m asked by someone I’m already having a conversation with. It’s natural to be curious and frankly it gives me something to talk about. My conversational skills are not the best. But if someone marches up and asks me out of the blue, it no longer feels like a matter of curiosity. It feels threatening. It happens more than you might expect. I’m also asked this quite a lot by people I’m arguing with on Twitter. There, the intent is very clearly malign and it’s definitely rude.
But a lot of people are shocked when someone asks me the question in good faith. They think it’s a topic that should be avoided, for some reason. Who’s that helping, exactly? Me or them? I’d much rather they just ask than pretend I’m not very obviously in a wheelchair and they’re very obviously wondering why.
I’m also asked quite a lot if I need help going up slopes and curbs. It’s easy to see in most cases that the intent is a genuine desire to help someone who might struggle and I always decline politely and warmly. These people are not being patronising, they’re going out of their way to offer help because of simple, honest empathy. It’s not offensive at all.
It is offensive when people grab the back of my chair and push me up the slope without warning or permission. Again, this happens a lot more often than you’d think. It happened when I was doing the Great North Run, for goodness sake! Would anyone just pick up another runner and carry them for a bit, all the time grinning to their friends? It happened in London a couple of weeks ago and when I reacted with shock and some anger, the man was furious at me since he was “only trying to help”.
Was he, though? Was he really? Or was it a performance? His reaction suggests the latter. I don’t like being used as a prop. And if you hang your bag on the back of my chair in the tube or at a bus stop so you don’t have to carry it (yep, happens surprisingly often too) then you deserve the elbow that is about to make contact with your testicles.
So don’t walk on eggshells around us. Make a joke about us rolling our chairs over eggshells, if you like. Just don’t joke about our being unable to walk on eggshells, unless you know us quite well. And don’t alter language on our behalf, it just mildly embarrasses us.
I understand the need for somewhat performative language in many areas. It’s a sign that people are paying attention to issues without having to address them explicitly and personally. It’s a signal that everyone has understood the tone a conversation will take and the boundaries that have been set. And it’s an agreement that some words and phrases are unacceptable for cultural or historical reasons. It’s when people go out of their way to invent offence on behalf of other people that we get idiocy like the ‘blind’ example above.
Wait, I’m probably not allowed to say “idiocy”, am I?
I think much of trans activism can be seen as “the performative invention of offence on behalf of other people.” If you’re subjected to this enough, you might be inclined to start self-censoring, or even joining in to hunt down others expressing wrongthink.
No, probably not “allowed.” Besides, it might actually be imbecility or moronitude you should be reaching for. You want to get the diagnosis right.
Until Thick, Cream-based Soup Rights Advocacy becomes a thing (you just wait!), you might use “chowderheadedness.”
You’re welcome!
I’ve been called “ableist” at least half a dozen times for objecting to a thread of around thirty tweets some trans activists posted specifically to mock my personal disability. It was silly little jokes like, oh I don’t know “he might want to walk that one back” and “he doesn’t have a leg to stand on”. But it was created in a failed attempt to hurt me specifically.
It didn’t offend me, it’s just more of the usual, but when I pointed out that it was kinda ableist it turned out I was the ableist all along!
Ffs.
I’ve long felt a certain antipathy toward the terminology invented supposedly for my benefit. Whenever I hear words like neurodivergent, a scream gathers deep within. People think they’re minimizing harm, but what they’re actually doing is minimizing my life, my experience, my struggle, my pain.
If these busybodies actually cared, they wouldn’t focus on eliminating language that assumes everyone does or can do something, and instead they’d try to help people do that thing. But, of course, that would require real effort. Language initiatives like this are the equivalent of prayer: a way to feel (and look) like you’re helping without any real commitment or investment.
#2 latsot
I think the logic runs: if you object to jokes about disability or disabled people, you are implying they are too fragile to cope without help. If that’s the case, ask them whether the same applies to jokes made about trans people and enbyism.
Spoiler: it won’t.
I suspect most of us here have lived long enough to see at least one, probably more rounds of an ‘offensive’ word or phrase being replaced by a ‘non-offensive’ one, only for common usage to render the replacement with all the baggage and negative implications it was supposed to avoid. People like to have meaning in their words – for good or ill. If you try and force a word change, people will just subvert the meaning.
Certain quarters of my field (computers) have recently taken exception to the terms master/slave–typically used to describe an architecture where one computer controls another–because of, you know, that unfortunate history of actual human slavery. People are now scrubbing documentation, replacing master/slave with primary/secondary, or something equally anodyne.
It’s annoying, yes, but it is also dysfunctional. Master/slave is precise, and everyone knows what it means. Primary/secondary is vague, and fails to convey with certainty the one crucial fact about the architecture: that the first computer controls the second. I’m not expecting any aircraft to fall out of the sky on account of this, but building and running computer systems is hard enough as it is: we don’t need to be creating made-up problems for ourselves.
I sometimes wonder what these people will do when they discover that the hardware engineers go around all day talking about “male” and “female” connectors. Or–for that matter–that Walmart sells male and female hose couplings. Newspeak, here we come!
Rob,
I believe that’s sometimes referred to as the “euphemism treadmill.”
Huh, makes sense.
This, a thousand times this.
latsot, thanks for using my term! It’s already sweeping the world! Well, maybe not the world, just a portion of it…a small portion. And maybe not sweeping, just…sort of crawling.
But hey, you used my word!
It’s a good invention!
It’d be zogborst not to.
It’s a perfectly cromulent word.
It’s a common word, down our way.