Post
by sTeamTraen » Fri Jun 26, 2020 2:03 pm
I seem to remember that on the BS forum there was a thread about this topic, although I don't remember many of the details except for an ironic suggestion that it might be OK to refer to someone as "totally Upminster" (a station on the District line that is "beyond Barking").
The thing is, almost everybody uses a little bit of hyperbole to express their anger and frustration from time to time. But most of the words or phrases that people will use to react to, say, a government policy that they believe is not in the country's best interests, or almost any tweet by Nadine Dorries, are likely to be ableist, in that the same term will surely at some point have been used in a derogatory fashion towards someone with an intellectual disability. Indeed, were a word or phrase that was free of such associations to be found (let's imagine it was agreed that henceforth calling someone "a complete Nadine Dorries(*)" was OK), the history of euphemistic language tells us that it would immediately be used in a derogatory fashion anyway (e.g., by schoolkids to mock the less able members of their class), at which point you'd have to start again.
ISTM that the difficulty is not with the language per se, but with the tendency (which I suspect most of us have to some degree or other) to assimilate behaviours that we disapprove of with those of someone who has an intellectual disability. I'm not sure that this is going to be easy to educate out of people. Certainly when a car pulls out from a side road in front of me when I'm on my bike, the first thing to come out of my mouth is likely to be some aspersion on the driver's logical reasoning capacity, and I can't promise that this is likely to improve very much. I'm not proud of that, but some habits are hard to unlearn. At least I can try to exercise more self-control when writing.
The forum's search feature might be an interesting place to start to find out how much one uses ableist terms. In my case it reveals that in just over 500 posts I have made zero mentions of "idiot" or "moron", but two of "stupid". One of those was directed at what I considered to be an ill-judged use of bleach in a public place and the other was directed at myself for making a basic error that led to a minor injury, but presumably that's no less severe, if the issue is the implication of comparisons with the intellectually disabled.
(*) Not an actual suggestion
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