Does disability language matter or is it all just PC nonsense?

So this morning I was having a twitter conversation about language and disability. So I thought I would blog about it. You can't really say everything in 140 characters! This entry has turned out to be very long and meandering and hasn't tackled what I thought it would but I hope it isn't too boring :-)

I have a real love of language, I have studied the English language, literature and even felt able to teach English in secondary schools for a short while. I do not claim to be an expert I just love studying how we use words. As many of you know I have also recently started learning Japanese a language very different to English, thrillingly different in my humble opinion! I am also disabled, I am partially sighted, always have been. I'm also a bit mad, or have a mental health condition. So the language of disability has always been of interest to me.

That old rhyme of "sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me" is just baloney. As a child I soon learnt that if someone hit me I could hit them back harder, but it was the brutality of words that really had the lasting impact on me. It was the teasing words that haunted me. When my class mates would call me "Triple glazing" or shout "Fit the best fit Everest" at me because of my thick glasses, it was annoying sometimes hurtful but sometimes I could see the funny side. (Those too young to remember the Everest line was from a popular 80s double glazing ad.) What really hurt was if someone called me a "spaz" or a "Joey" and they didn't just call me this, these were popular insults of the 1980s British playground. (As gay seems to be now, sadly.) For me though the words were loaded, I knew they referred to disabled or "handicapped" people as they said back then. That was me, that was my uncle with muscular dystrophy, it just seemed so unfair to me as a child for those words could be used as insults.

Kids love bad words, and can be viciously cruel with language. It isn't just kids though. The English language is a rich and wonderful one. It's a myth that the Inuit have 100 words for snow, but the principal of the myth is true. We give many names and euphemisms to the important things to us culturally. In English we have boundless words for the concepts of being drunk, death, sex and rain to name a few.

Lets take being drunk you could be plastered, sozzled, bladdered, squiffy, pissed, inebriated, tired and emotional, sloshed, wasted, tipsy, and so I could go on. We give many names to things that are important, or taboo. For death the words are more euphemistic so we don't actually mention the d word, passed on, passed over, in a better place, even kicked the bucket is a way of avoiding saying the d word.

So language can be loaded with many meanings, we can use it to hide things, avoid things, to hurt and of course to empower as well. When the civil rights movement talked of black power and black is beautiful they were claiming the word black and empowering each other with it.

Disability language is full of euphemisms, and words that hide or cover up something that society is afraid to approach head on. It is also full of words generated in fear that are used consciously or unconsciously to distance the user from the issue they are afraid of; to make the user feel more powerful than the person or people they are talking about.

The best examples but not the only are the myriad words to describe madness, from nutter, crack pot, psycho, schizo, to loony, doolally, barmy, crazy, loopy and bonkers. I think in that list you can find the words which are used harshly and crudely and those we use every day now to describe people who have no kind of mental health condition at all. Madness terrifies people and society greatly. On an individual basis none of us like to be faced by someone behaving in an unusual way, which is distressing to them or others. We like people to behave in the same way we do. Organised society, certainly in the west, is afraid of madness because mad people are unpredictable and may not behave in the structured way the society dictates. (Personally I think societies should just get over it and let people behave as they like as long as they aren't hurting anyone or themselves.) I am not going to go on about Christianities role in how we talk about or see madness or disability, that is a whole new blog entry. I also think that everyone on a personal level is also afraid of confronting the issues of madness because they know it could happen to them, it is very real we need to be distanced from it.

Fear has lead many societies to do many terrible things to the people or things that they fear. So with mental health we have had centuries of mad people being locked up, promoted as hate figures or comic figures to be feared or mocked. Society will keep them in their place, locked up, or terrified but they won't be rocking society's boat or upsetting our sensibilities. Even now the media is obsessed with stories about people with mental health conditions such as schizophrenia being potentially violent. Even though every statistic points to the fact the overwhelming number of people with schizophrenia are more likely to harm themselves than any other person, the media ignores this. "Nutter on the loose" stories sell papers, generates clicks to websites.

Mental health as I said isn't the only disability to be portrayed in this way. People with learning disabilities have been subjected to centuries of being labeled stupid, the village idiot, simple, weak in the head, or called names like mong. All though not feared in quite the same way as mad people, and I would argue that is because society does not see people with learning disabilities as much of a threat as mad people. People with learning disabilities may not submit completely to all of the subtle rules of society but those in power have thought that they are unlikely to undermine these rules in the way a mad person might. They aren't going to form and army and rebel. (Or so the people in power think...) Many other disabilities are feared in similar ways but I think mental health and learning disability are the easiest to reference.

But language isn't just used to put, keep and reinforce people's positions in society's grand scheme of things. With disability, language has been used to label disabled people in medical terms. Disabled people had no say in how these words were used to label them. Maybe 60, 70 years ago a child was told by a Dr they had Polio and that they would be a cripple. That was the language used. For disabled people in the 1970's and 80s language was a big thing because they only had at their disposal medical language dolled out by professionals which quite often meant nothing to anyone else or the age old terms for disability which had been developed out of fear and pity such as cripple, handicapped, simpleton or madman or any of the other words listed else where in this blog.

The social model of disability revolutionised the language of disability. So medical terms for impairments would firmly stay describing the impairment, whilst words relating to what disables a person would focus on society's barriers and the adjustments made to overcome those barriers would be positive, hence a person is "a wheelchair user" their wheelchair is something they use to get over the barriers society creates. Trouble is no one told the rest of the world about the social model of disability. Trouble is many disabled people don't agree with all, or want more from it or just don't know about the social model of disability either. So we ended up in a world post 1990 when this change in language in terms of disability was swept up along with the whole PC "movement" and tarnished in many people's minds as being all a load of PC madness. (PC Madness, a bit like PC World but somewhere I'd feel more at home I'm sure! You can by a manic Mac or a depressed windows 7 Sony laptop :-) )

Which gets me on to the word special as in "special needs," why was this voted in the top 10 of most hated words by disabled people? I think it was because yet again it was word given to disabled people by a group of non disabled people. Most disabled children since the mid 80s will have come across this label in school. "Special Needs" covers everything from children who have a physical or learning disability to those who have "Behavioural problems." Every child I hope knows that they are special and that their parents think they are the most special child in the world. No child needs to be told on an institutional basis that they are special or have special needs. Kids are not stupid, they sniff out a euphemism straight away. They will mercilessly rip a euphemism and untruth out and use it on who ever they like. So special needs now is bandied about by kids as an insult.

I was teased a lot at school but every child in my class knew I was partially sighted, never did they chant "partially sighted" at me. Why? I think it was because it isn't a loaded statement, it isn't a euphemism. But special needs, and derogatory terms for disabled people were shouted at me. I have to say us visually impaired people do come out of the language thing fairly well. Blind as a bat is as bad as it gets or "window licker" - which when I first heard as an adult made me laugh. Once on the tube a guy tapped me on the shoulder and said "I thought you were being dead brazen snorting cocaine off your book in front of everyone on the tube, but you're visually impaired aren't you?" He said it so sheepishly with a devilish glint in his eye that I just had to laugh. I don't feel so self conscious now when reading in public, nose glued to my book.

So I think what I am trying to say is that:

Language is important because it is used so subtly but profoundly as a tool to disempower or empower
The language of disability is complex and evolving
The social model of disability needs to be more widely understood
If you aren't sure how to refer to someone or to something concerning disability, ask the person involved! They will know how they want to be referred to!