According to a story in USA Today, some lowly airline employee is being excoriated for using the wrong terminology to describe people who can neither hear nor speak:
A deaf couple from Texas demanded an apology from American Airlines after seeing a note on their luggage that read: “Please text. Deaf and dumb.”
When Angela Huckaby and James Moehle returned from a Hawaiian vacation, they found that the airline had lost their luggage. When they received it on Sunday morning, they saw the note scrawled on the luggage receipt, reports KTRK-TV in Houston.
“It was just outrageous and cruel and unnecessary,” said Moehle’s mother, Kay Moehle, in an interview with KTRK.
Ms. Moehle demands that whoever wrote the reminder be fired.
The story alerted me to the fact that activists now maintain that the word “dumb” to be an insult.
Deaf-mute is a term which was used historically to identify a person who was either deaf using a sign language or both deaf and could not speak. The term continues to be used to refer to deaf people, mainly within a historical context, to indicate deaf people who cannot speak an oral language, or have some degree of speaking ability, but choose not to speak because of the negative or unwanted attention atypical voices sometimes attract. Such people communicate using sign language.[1] Some consider it to be a derogatory term if used outside its historical context; the preferred term today is simply “deaf”.[2]
Additionally, it is sometimes used to refer to other hearing people in jest, to chide, or to invoke an image of someone who refuses to employ common sense or who is unreliable. “Deaf and dumb,”[3] “semi-deaf” and “semi-mute” are other historic references to deaf people. Of these latter examples, only “deaf and dumb” prevails as a reference.
In the past deaf-mute was regarded as a socially acceptable term, usually to describe deaf people who use sign language, but in modern times, the term is frequently viewed as derogatory, insensitive, insulting, inaccurate or socially and politically incorrect.[4] From antiquity (as noted in the Code of Hammurabi) until recent times, the terms “deaf-mute” and “deaf and dumb” were even considered analogous to “stupid” by some hearing people.[5]
In Europe and Western society, most deaf people are taught to speak with varying outcomes of ability or degrees of fluency. The simple identity of “deaf” has been embraced by the community of signing deaf people since the foundations of public deaf education in the 18th century and remains the preferred term of reference or identity for many years. Within the deaf community there are some who prefer the term “Deaf” to “deaf” as a description of their status and identity.[6]
These things get more and more complicated. Pretty soon the word “deaf” will be an insult. Or “blind.” “Retarded” already is.
I’m sick of these endless wars over words. What ought to matter is whether a word was meant as an insult, not whether it was taken as an insult.
Anything can be taken as an insult.
Comments
9 responses to “Word wars”
What happens when the Politically Correct forbid the use of any of our words?
Or we be speaking Farsi, or Arabic. Or Russian by then?
What do “black hole,” “angel food cake,” and “devil’s food cake” have in common?
They’re all racist terms, says a Dallas County, Texas, official.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/07/11/texas-county-official-sees-race-in-term-black-hole/
Sorry, but thanks to Tommy it’ll always be deaf, dumb, & blind for me.
This crap reduces comprehension.
The one that annoys me the most is “Oriental”.
I don’t mean Asian as I’m not talking about Indians, Pakistanis, Kazakhs, Afghans or even Russians from west of the Urals, I mean people with the epicanthic fold.
Mentally retarded describes something fairly exactly, “developmentally disabled” does not as it covers a bunch of verboten words.
The worst part is that the Newspeak word that replaces the Oldspeak work will just become bad in a few years so we’ll have to stop using the new one.
Recently, homosexual has become homophobic.
I do look forward to when homophobic become homophobic.
Ever get the impression that our PC masters are changing the taboo words faster than any sane person can keep up with in order to vilify, condemn and exclude everyone except the chosen elite?
BTW, I once heard that the Russian for a black hole is “frozen star”. Black hole means something else entirely.
I’ve been calling our PC masters puritans and roundheads. To carry the analogy further consider the Calinist concept of election. The elect are the pre-chosen by god to be heaven-bound since the moment of creation; they can commit no sin no matter how egregious their behavior. Thus some Hollowood scum such as Alec Baldwin can engage in any manner of repulsive rant and not be condemned for it as he’s of the elect, and yet some lowly airline employee faces eternal damnation for a slight lack of adherence to the latest terminological edict from above.
Or, as Robert Burns has it:
O Thou, who in the heavens does dwell,
Who, as it pleases best Thysel’,
Sends ane to heaven an’ ten to hell,
A’ for Thy glory,
And no for ony gude or ill
They’ve done afore Thee!
I bless and praise Thy matchless might,
When thousands Thou hast left in night,
That I am here afore Thy sight,
For gifts an’ grace
A burning and a shining light
To a’ this place.
What was I, or my generation,
That I should get sic exaltation,
I wha deserve most just damnation
For broken laws,
Five thousand years ere my creation,
Thro’ Adam’s cause?
When frae my mither’s womb I fell,
Thou might hae plunged me in hell,
To gnash my gums, to weep and wail,
In burnin lakes,
Where damned devils roar and yell,
Chain’d to their stakes.
Yet I am here a chosen sample,
To show thy grace is great and ample;
I’m here a pillar o’ Thy temple,
Strong as a rock,
A guide, a buckler, and example,
To a’ Thy flock.
O Lord, Thou kens what zeal I bear,
When drinkers drink, an’ swearers swear,
An’ singin there, an’ dancin here,
Wi’ great and sma’;
For I am keepit by Thy fear
Free frae them a’.
But yet, O Lord! confess I must,
At times I’m fash’d wi’ fleshly lust:
An’ sometimes, too, in wardly trust,
Vile self gets in:
But Thou remembers we are dust,
Defil’d wi’ sin.
O Lord! yestreen, Thou kens, wi’ Meg-
Thy pardon I sincerely beg,
O! may’t ne’er be a livin plague
To my dishonour,
An’ I’ll ne’er lift a lawless leg
Again upon her.
Besides, I farther maun allow,
Wi’ Leezie’s lass, three times I trow-
But Lord, that Friday I was fou,
When I cam near her;
Or else, Thou kens, Thy servant true
Wad never steer her.
Maybe Thou lets this fleshly thorn
Buffet Thy servant e’en and morn,
Lest he owre proud and high shou’d turn,
That he’s sae gifted:
If sae, Thy han’ maun e’en be borne,
Until Thou lift it.
Lord, bless Thy chosen in this place,
For here Thou hast a chosen race:
But God confound their stubborn face,
An’ blast their name,
Wha bring Thy elders to disgrace
An’ public shame.
Lord, mind Gaw’n Hamilton’s deserts;
He drinks, an’ swears, an’ plays at cartes,
Yet has sae mony takin arts,
Wi’ great and sma’,
Frae God’s ain priest the people’s hearts
He steals awa.
An’ when we chasten’d him therefor,
Thou kens how he bred sic a splore,
An’ set the warld in a roar
O’ laughing at us;-
Curse Thou his basket and his store,
Kail an’ potatoes.
Lord, hear my earnest cry and pray’r,
Against that Presbyt’ry o’ Ayr;
Thy strong right hand, Lord, make it bare
Upo’ their heads;
Lord visit them, an’ dinna spare,
For their misdeeds.
O Lord, my God! that glib-tongu’d Aiken,
My vera heart and flesh are quakin,
To think how we stood sweatin’, shakin,
An’ p-‘d wi’ dread,
While he, wi’ hingin lip an’ snakin,
Held up his head.
Lord, in Thy day o’ vengeance try him,
Lord, visit them wha did employ him,
And pass not in Thy mercy by ’em,
Nor hear their pray’r,
But for Thy people’s sake, destroy ’em,
An’ dinna spare.
But, Lord, remember me an’ mine
Wi’ mercies temp’ral an’ divine,
That I for grace an’ gear may shine,
Excell’d by nane,
And a’ the glory shall be thine,
Amen, Amen!
I got my first experience of the endless cycle of PC renaming back in the 70a. I went to work at a state run institution for the medically retarded. The training course emphasized that those living at the institution were no longer to be called “patients,” but “residents.” Our instructor explained to us that 1) while patients usually expect to be “cured” of what sent them to an MD or to a hospital, the mentally retarded had a condition that wasn’t going to improve; 2)They lived at the institution.
I went back to work there a second time several years after quitting the place to go back to school full time. The instructor for my re-orientation day I had explained to me that those living at the institution were no longer “residents,” but were now “clients.” I immediately thought to myself that clients tell professionals what they want. The mentally retarded are generally unable to verbalize what they want.
Who knows what the mentally retarded are called now, and how many times the correct word has been changed?
Mentally challenged?
The differenty brained?