some thoughts.

[annwyd]

So, there's stuff about "PC bullshit" floating around on the blogonets at the moment? I haven't read the post that sparked it off, because I've seen enough from quotes alone to know I'd just rage (fuck you, "kyriarchy" is an awesome and extremely useful word). But some things that crop up in the responses are making me uncomfortable

Comments

[brooksmoses]

Yeah, this is something I've been thinking for a while.

"Crazy", as a word, has a history that is much longer than the modern conception of mental illness, and a very rich set of meanings about mental states that are not all pejorative and are not something for which there is a good synonym. It happens that certain types of mental illness can be accurately described by it, and so people naturally use the word to describe them, but that does not make it a word that "means" mental illness and is being erroneously applied elsewhere. (Literally, the word means "full of cracks", though the metaphorical meanings about states of mind date to the 1617 at least.)

It does not make sense, then, to say "Well, this word is now being used to describe some kinds of mental illness, and so it should not be used for anything else." The word means that one is in a state of mind that produces absurd results, and if it is socially damaging (and I agree that it is) to paint all mentally-ill people with a word that's associated with that meaning, then the error is not in associating the word with a meaning that it has had since the 1600s, but in associating the word with mental illness as a category. And this is not simply a problem with the word, though the word is a symptom and vector of the underlying conceptual problem; the fundamental problem is that a depressed person (for example) is not crazy in the standard meaning of the word by being depressed, and so it is wrong to refer to them as such.

(There is a digression here into self-labeling, and the fact that some depressed people find it useful and accurate to refer to their depression as craziness, so as to give the depressed feelings a name that means "this is absurd and not reality" and so drain its power. But this is a digression from the main point.)

So, I think the right answer to claims that one should not use "crazy" for non-mentally-ill absurdity is to ask, "What makes you think that a mentally ill person is 'crazy'?" And, more generally, to stop using words that mean "this person's mental state is absurd and divorced from reality" to refer to mental illness that isn't like that -- which goes hand in hand with not thinking that mental illness implies such a state.

[brooksmoses]

Admittedly, I need to be a little careful making "appeal to established usage" arguments about usages, given that the figurative sense of "lame" was used by Chaucer in 1374, but I think there's a clear distinction that lameness literally does mean injured in a way that inhibits walking, whereas craziness does not literally mean mental illness any more than it means mentally-healthy absurd thinking.