Disablist
"This plan is so good it's retarded"
The other week there was a post on the f-word blog apologising for a previous post which had used "disablist" language. Disablist language is a fairly new concept to me, though the principle's familiar. It's language that implies that disabled people are worse than other people.
Part of it is using the words against people suffering from disabilities, but what I'm mainly concerned with here is their use as general pejoratives. The arguments are very similar to those around the use of "gay". The logic is simple: saying bad things are "gay" implies that people who are gay are bad.
In this instance the two offending words were "cretin" and "idiot".
Idiot is the most striking because it's such an everyday word. I'd bet that most people use it, and never think about any connection with mental disabilities. In fact, how many people even know these terms were used to describe mental disabilities? (I don't believe they're officially used any more.) I knew that when the IQ system was invented, the term "idiot" was used for someone with a very low IQ. Before that, it has associations with "village idiot", but I'd never really connected "idiot" with mentally disabled.
"Cretin" I had to look up to find out the relevant meaning, which is a particular kind of "dwarfed and deformed idiot". Of course, this meaning of the word might not have been forgotten by people suffering from this condition. Intriguingly, "cretin" actually comes out of "christian" and was used not to demean but to emphasise the shared humanity of these people.
There is an assumption that the different uses of words will always blur into one another. I'm not convinced this is the case. I'm reminded of studies showing that homophobia in schools has declined a great deal. At the same time, "gay" has become a wide-ranging and widely used insult. Which contrasts to when I was younger and "gay" was used less but more seriously and with the specific meaning of "you are sexually attracted to men and this is bad." It is entirely possible for words in English to change meaning to their opposite or even hold two opposite meanings. The words "bad" and "wicked" in some slang, for example.
Another problem is that we use these words to describe acts or people that are foolish, badly-considered, senseless. But isn't acting without sense the most basic definition of "crazy" or "mad"? This is not true of sexist or racist language.
What makes this extra difficult is that we don't distinguish well between acts we think are misguided and acts we think are bad. As well demonstrated by the word "wrong". So Saddam Hussein could be described as a "mad dictator" and it's not clear whether we think what he does is rationally inexplicable or morally unjustifiable. If I say George Osborne's economic policies are idiotic, that's probably going to be both an objective and a value judgement (they'll fail at his goal of making the economy grow but succeed at his goal of keeping the rich rich). Perhaps we think there is no distinction, and that all acts based on correct facts and logic are good; that is certainly often the case if we're talking about politics.
So (as usual) I'm uncertain on the whole subject. Rejecting this use of language, at least for terms like "idiot" and "crazy", seems to take a simplistic view of how language works and develops and to be dredging up connotations that people would otherwise forget about. On the other hand, the general principle is that the impact is judged by the group of people who suffer (or not) from it, and the objections seem overall a bit wishy-washy.
The other week there was a post on the f-word blog apologising for a previous post which had used "disablist" language. Disablist language is a fairly new concept to me, though the principle's familiar. It's language that implies that disabled people are worse than other people.
Part of it is using the words against people suffering from disabilities, but what I'm mainly concerned with here is their use as general pejoratives. The arguments are very similar to those around the use of "gay". The logic is simple: saying bad things are "gay" implies that people who are gay are bad.
In this instance the two offending words were "cretin" and "idiot".
Idiot is the most striking because it's such an everyday word. I'd bet that most people use it, and never think about any connection with mental disabilities. In fact, how many people even know these terms were used to describe mental disabilities? (I don't believe they're officially used any more.) I knew that when the IQ system was invented, the term "idiot" was used for someone with a very low IQ. Before that, it has associations with "village idiot", but I'd never really connected "idiot" with mentally disabled.
"Cretin" I had to look up to find out the relevant meaning, which is a particular kind of "dwarfed and deformed idiot". Of course, this meaning of the word might not have been forgotten by people suffering from this condition. Intriguingly, "cretin" actually comes out of "christian" and was used not to demean but to emphasise the shared humanity of these people.
There is an assumption that the different uses of words will always blur into one another. I'm not convinced this is the case. I'm reminded of studies showing that homophobia in schools has declined a great deal. At the same time, "gay" has become a wide-ranging and widely used insult. Which contrasts to when I was younger and "gay" was used less but more seriously and with the specific meaning of "you are sexually attracted to men and this is bad." It is entirely possible for words in English to change meaning to their opposite or even hold two opposite meanings. The words "bad" and "wicked" in some slang, for example.
Another problem is that we use these words to describe acts or people that are foolish, badly-considered, senseless. But isn't acting without sense the most basic definition of "crazy" or "mad"? This is not true of sexist or racist language.
What makes this extra difficult is that we don't distinguish well between acts we think are misguided and acts we think are bad. As well demonstrated by the word "wrong". So Saddam Hussein could be described as a "mad dictator" and it's not clear whether we think what he does is rationally inexplicable or morally unjustifiable. If I say George Osborne's economic policies are idiotic, that's probably going to be both an objective and a value judgement (they'll fail at his goal of making the economy grow but succeed at his goal of keeping the rich rich). Perhaps we think there is no distinction, and that all acts based on correct facts and logic are good; that is certainly often the case if we're talking about politics.
So (as usual) I'm uncertain on the whole subject. Rejecting this use of language, at least for terms like "idiot" and "crazy", seems to take a simplistic view of how language works and develops and to be dredging up connotations that people would otherwise forget about. On the other hand, the general principle is that the impact is judged by the group of people who suffer (or not) from it, and the objections seem overall a bit wishy-washy.