Photo by Kate Abels

Disable-Speak: Jargon for the Modern Age


Photo by Kate Abels

In HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David argues with a wheelchair user over occupying the accessible stall in the men’s room:

Larry David:
If you were here, I would’ve given you first dibs, but honestly, I haven’t seen a handicapped person in the bathroom, maybe, EVER!

Wheelchair User:
… A “handicapped person”!? That’s nice. Oh, that’s nice. It’s called “disabled.”

Larry:
Disabled?

Wheelchair User:
Disabled!!

Larry:
Err … that doesn’t sound so hot.

Dyspeptic nudge that he is, Larry David [co-creator of Seinfeld, among other television credits] is right about this. “Disabled” doesn’t sound all that great. But it’s the best we’ve come up with so far. It’s the most proper, least offensive reference to the vast world of the, ah, disabled in 2009 America. Activists, fund-raisers, and fellow travelers have been working at this for at least a hundred years, you know, and there are no doubt advances still to be made. Simply applying no disability-centric attribution at all to someone in a wheelchair or otherwise “alternately challenged” might be the best solution, but that’s probably a ways off.

To get a fair reading on the current state of the jargon of disability, all you have to do is turn on your TV. Of course, there are only a smattering of fictional characters with any kind of disability on American TV — the statistics are pathetic — but they/we do show up from time to time on the news and on reality shows like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. In fact, that particular program seems to specialize in heartwarming home remodeling projects for the disabled. A recent episode featured Ty Pennington and his crew of thousands raising the roof on a new adaptive home for a family with two children with developmental disabilities, plus expanding the coffee shop of an entrepreneur with CP. By current standards, the language was meant to be respectful and disability-friendly. “Kids with special needs” (oops) was probably the most common reference, along with an occasional “challenged,” “brave,” and of course, “disabled.” Beyond words, they even featured a hard-hat-wearing double amputee driving an earth mover. It is a show that bends over backwards to both help the disabled and to show them in a positive, productive light. What’s wrong with that? We’ve come a long way, right?

We’ll return to that question in a minute, but first we should see how the language of disability has evolved over the last century or so. I turned for help to Paul Longmore, professor of history at San Francisco State University, author of Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability and in general, a guy who knows this stuff cold. First, Longmore pointed out, the meaning of any particular figure of speech depends on where you are located and who’s making the reference. This especially applies historically. Before World War I, for instance, the most common term for someone in a wheelchair or otherwise paralyzed was “crippled.” Dark, dingy hospitals for impaired kids were called names like “House of St. Giles the Cripple” or the “New York Society for the Relief of the Ruptured and Crippled.” In using this word, no one was going out of their way to demean or belittle St. Giles, an early Christian hermit paralyzed by an errant arrow. That’s what the Patron Saint of Cripples was: crippled.

Although “handicapped” was the new enlightened term of his era, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt consistently referred to himself as a “cripple” as he led the nation through both the Great Depression and World War II.

The enlightened people of the time, though, thought crippled was hurtful and degrading, so they came up with “handicapped.” In Longmore’s words, “‘Handicapped’ was the new consciousness of the era.” Apparently no one told President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who continued to refer to himself as a cripple throughout the Great Depression and World War II, and even when I was growing up in Oklahoma in the 1950s, people in chairs were cripples. Not that there were too many disability rights activists riding herd on correct usage in small town Oklahoma in them there days.

Some people to this day don’t mind the word, “crippled.” One is Anita Silvers, the chair of the philosophy department at San Francisco State and a wheelchair user from PPS since 1950. Silvers sees terms like this from a generational perspective, along with other disabled identifiers like “brave” and “courageous.”  Being disabled long before there was broad-based activism, Silvers knew you had to be a “brave cripple” to survive. She remembers getting up before dawn to hoist herself up steps at school without anyone seeing her, and then waiting until everyone had gone home at night to navigate down the same steps. “If anyone had seen me,” she says, “I’d been out of a job.” From her view, being called a cripple was the least of her worries.

In any case, “crippled” faded and “handicapped” ended up on bathroom stall doors and parking placards, at least for a decade or two. Then the real activists took charge in the 1980s and a fierce rhetorical argument broke out. “Handicapped” was scuttled in a heartbeat and “disabled” took hold. Also an epidemic of hard-to-say hyphenates arose to describe the newfound status of the disabled: “mobility-challenged,” “differently-abled,” “alternately-abled,” “alternately-mobility-gifted” — terms so wooden and convoluted that they made everyone feel more self-conscious, not less. They must have made some afraid-to-offend bureaucrats happy, but according to Longmore, most people with disabilities found these politically-correct tongue-twisters as patronizing as “poor crippled guy.”

People-First Language: Doomed?
The real battle has and is being fought over what the disability cognoscente call “people-first labeling.” In one corner are those who believe there is no such thing as a “disabled person.” There are only “people with a disability” and extrapolated, “people with paralysis,” “people with an amputation,” “people with deafness,” etc. The grammatical logic says “paralyzed person” defines that person, while “person with paralysis” only describes one aspect of their identity, as would calling someone a “person with a sense of humor” or “person with really big ears.”

In the other corner from the people-first labelers are those who think these kinds of rhetorical distinctions have, in the words of Anita Silvers, “no applicable or important difference.” Such hair-splitting, according to this camp, is just identity politics run amok. Who the hell cares if I refer to my friend in a chair as “paralyzed” as opposed to “with paralysis,” as long as it’s not said with a condescending sneer?  Longmore remembers being called out at a conference because he made the egregious mistake of saying “blind people” instead of “people with blindness.” His response: “No one actually talks that way!”

It’s hard for people outside the label-sensitive disability community to keep up, but more respectful language has somehow trickled down to the middle of the country, where, you know, the “real” Americans live. Writer and university communications expert Natalea Watkins, a T5 para living on a ranch in rural Oklahoma [see Sept. 2008 “My Town“], rarely hears a discouraging or offensive word about her condition and this is the part of America where, in normal discourse, Arabs are called towel-heads and camel-jockeys and Hispanics are called beaners. Watkins thinks regular Okies are “sensitized by their own imaginations” in carefully choosing their words toward her kind. She does bump into the occasional bedrock Christian who thinks that if she just prayed harder and lived cleaner, she could walk again, but that’s the extent of the tacit tsk-tsking she normally gets.

People-first labeling might still win the day, but meanwhile, it is being crowded out, at least in some quarters, with an even newer new consciousness — ironic, yes? It is now a declaration of pride and whimsy and in-your-face bluntness to refer to yourself as a crip, a gimp, or even — God forbid — a spaz. What once was demeaning is now empowering. All diversity groups do this — the “n-word” becomes niggaz and sells millions of rap albums, at least among “people with blackness.” This kind of labeling of course is reserved for only those inside the group. I can call myself a crip, but if the ticket-taker at the movie says, “Crips sit down front,” he’s in for a serious tongue-lashing.

Evolution of True Cool
In 2004, John Box, president of Colours ‘N Motion, decided to play off of the new irony by calling a wheelchair model “Spazz.” Why? For one, he liked the word. It was, he says, “energetic more than derogatory … a name that was so far reaching, so cool, that a lot of people didn’t even know it was cool.” It was also an innovative, L-framed chair that users took to pretty readily. Today the Spazz is Colour’s number-one-selling wheelchair.

The only people bothered by this coinage, Box claims, were people “on the outside looking in,” i.e., people who cared about the disabled but weren’t generally disabled themselves. That’s not entirely true. Bob Vogel, the resident New Mobility sports and recreation expert, has a slightly different view. He considers the word itself “no big deal,” but doesn’t choose to tool around in a chair named “one who is inept” or “klutz” or “spastic.” As the professor said, it all depends on where you are located.

A crowd gathers as the TV show Extreme Makeover unveils the newly modified home of Paul Guinta, a husband and father with SCI. Host Ty Pennington often says “special needs” instead of “disability,” but it’s hard to complain when he makes scenes such as this one possible.

The only large-scale problem Colours has encountered with the Spazz is the United Kingdom market. For whatever reason, the Brit disability community remains strongly opposed to the word. According to Box, it has a much more demeaning connotation over there. It’s tantamount to calling someone a … insert your favorite Sopranos word here. In a survey conducted by the BBC online disability site, “Ouch,” [www.bbc.co.uk/ouch] “spastic” was not only an offensive word among disabled respondents, it was the number one most offensive word. It was followed, in descending order, by retard, brave, special, and our old friend, cripple. Number three of the combined list of disabled and non-disabled respondents was a slur never uttered in the New World: window-licker. When I find out what this means, I’ll let you know.

One T12 para who loves his Spazz chair and even tags himself online as “Spazz1643” is ex-San Francisco cop, Ron Artale. “Spazz” in his handle is a nod to the chair, and “1643” is his old badge number. Artale spent 33 years on the force, facing down violent scofflaws daily, but only became paralyzed after retiring. His cop friends don’t blanch at the word “spazz” — it fits right in with the dark humor that helps them through the often nasty and dangerous work they do. To Artale and his buds, “spazz” is just what it was intended to be — a disarming joke.

No matter where you come down on all these labels, the question remains — does changing the vernacular actually change attitudes and improve the overall situation? Paul Longmore, for one, has his doubts. Let’s go back to the language used on Extreme Makeover, specifically the term, “with special needs.” This is a very common reference these days — Sarah Palin used it every five minutes in the presidential campaign — and is often applied to all disabled people and not just children. So, what’s the problem with being “special”?

Like “brave,” “exceptional,” and “heroic,” “special” is one of those too-nice words that drive many crips up the wall, a polite euphemism that means segregated, not the same, different, odd. A kid with special needs has to struggle to get mainstreamed into a regular classroom and later, the regular world. And “need” obviously means needy, and that’s not good. “Special needs” is a tag every bit as patronizing and marginalizing as handicapped or “afflicted by” or “suffers from.” There’s nothing positive or upbeat about it. If someone refers to having a loved one with special needs, it doesn’t sound like fun. It sounds like work.

Whatever you think about all of this, that’s where we are in Disable-Speak, 2009. Perhaps the language wars are largely over. Whatever the stigma attached to the current, most common public jargon — from “disabled person,” i.e., people-second, to the tongue-in-cheek use of “gimp” — it is a subtle stigma, and perhaps insignificant, compared to the long, brutal pre-“handicapped” history of disgusting, hateful, derogatory slurs towards the disabled. When a guy on TV is building a brand new house to accommodate a caring family with two kids with special needs, I for one am not about to accuse him of insensitivity or disabled-bashing. As soon as someone comes up with a less patronizing term for those kids and the faux-pas-fearful American public hears about it, they’ll adopt it. Many of them will grumble about updating their terminology, like Larry David in that bathroom, but they’ll come around. They will, as Watkins says, be “sensitized by their own imaginations” of being in the same place.

Let’s just hope, my fellow crips, that a greater measure of acceptance and inclusion evolves alongside tomorrow’s right-sounding lexicon.


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