I’m sure that my title there is kind of obvious to anyone who’s part of a social justice movement. This particular post is really aimed at people who aren’t, and who haven’t thought about it.
We all know that awful old adage, ‘bricks and bones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.’ Most of us know that it couldn’t be much farther from the truth. Words hurt. We know that instinctively as children, which is why we start figuring out which words will hurt whom at a very young age. I can’t pretend I didn’t do that, though I will say most of it was tangled up in the quarrels of siblings and not vented at vulnerable people.
Here’s the thing – some words are more loaded than others. Some words are involved in systems of oppression, both empowered by the system and fueling the system. Some words are problems because they are tied to fundamental parts of who we are – our gender, our race, our religion, our disability, our sexuality, our religious beliefs. And they are painful because those words always say something deeper than that – what they say is, ‘You are not as good as me. You are not normal.’
The truly difficult part is that some of these words have become embedded in our language deeply, so that they now have a secondary meaning – bad. People my age and older have watched it happen to the word ‘gay’. You see it with the addition of the ending ‘tard’ (as in, fucktard), which is drawn from the word ‘retard’. This is when it gets insidious.
Why? Because people don’t think about the original meaning, but the word never really loses it. My father decries things he doesn’t like as ‘lame’, but he also calls me lame when I injure myself, and we call a horse that is limping ‘lame’. It means all of these things, which means that when you use it to mean ‘bad’, you reiterate the idea that the original meaning is bad. So…my abnormal gait, the thing that makes me ‘lame,’ is coded as bad.
And don’t tell me people don’t know this. Haven’t you heard kids insulting each other with the adjective ‘retarded’ and known they meant someone with developmental disabilities? We know what these words mean and we keep using them anyhow!
I’m making a list of words we should not use, but do. Please feel free to add your own, and why they shouldn’t be used! (excluding of course use in a reclamatory sense, which I’ll talk about in Social Justice 3: Reclamation)
*Blind/nearsighted/shortsighted – all references to visual acuity often used to describe making errors in judgement
*Lame – reference to altered gait used to describe things that are bad
*Cripple – reference to physical ability, usually walking ability, used as an insult. Also used as a negative adjective and verb, as in ‘a crippled bus’, ‘the strike crippled the city’.
*Spaz – reference to spasticity, used to describe erratic motion or actions
*crazy/mad/insane – references to state of sanity, used to describe the ’cause’ of all kinds of undesirable actions, without regard for the actual sanity of the person.
*psychotic – reference to state of sanity, often used to describe someone frightening, where psychopath might be a more accurate term, as psychotic just means someone who has had a break with reality (and for what it’s worth, the only psychotic person I’ve ever seen was just disconcerting, not scary – she was trying to have conversations with inanimate objects)
*schizo/schiznophrenic – reference to a specific mental illness, often used to describe unpredictable or erratic behavior
*bipolar – reference to a specific mental illness, used to describe someone who is giving two different reactions (see for example the Katy Perry song, ‘Hot and Cold’, which describes her relationship as a ‘love bipolar’)
Right, so in addition to the disability related ones, here’s a few more I put on the list of things not to be said:
*Bitch – woman as dog? Come on!
*Slut/whore – judgement made about a person’s sexual choices? Not cool.
*Racial epithets
*Gay – reference to sexuality used to describe things that are bad
*Fatty/fat as insult – referring to a person’s state of not being thin as a reason to torment and make fun of them just sucks
I know I’m missing a lot here, words that we need to really think about why we use them. In all likelihood, the best answer is to either completely remove them from our vocabularies, with a few exceptions that can be used accurately, like ‘gay’. We’re not perfect, and we’re likely to make mistakes, but choosing to engage and try to do this right is valuable.
Now, before you talk about how Political Correctness is bad or call me the PC police, trust me that I’ll get to talking about that issue in Social Justice (2) – PC Police!
Brilliant Mind Broken Body 
OHHH! I love your blog entry! It is so insightful. I wish everyone could read it.
Lindsey Petersen
http://5kidswdisabilities.wordpress.com
You’re right about those words, of course. The word “retard” and it’s new dirivitives really bother me. “Retard” was a popular word among kids for other kids they didn’t like back when I was a child (a long time ago). It took many years, but the word was finally retired as totally uncool, and “mentally disabled” or “mentally challenged” replaced it as descriptors for people who actually had those conditions. “Retard” as an epithet died.
But now it’s back — and getting more use than ever. I guess words come and go in patterns over years and generations, like fashions. With any luck, it won’t be long before that word becomes unusable in that context again.
Some of the other words on your list are less painful, at least to me. “Crippled,” for instance, works well as a descriptor for physical disability. Personally, I worry about being “crippled” by rheumatoid arthritis someday, but at the same time, I’d never call myself or anyone else a “cripple.” “Disabled” means the same thing, I guess, but doesn’t carry that ugly, negative, put-down connotation — yet. It also doesn’t carry the same oomph in a sentence as in regards to actual meaning, but that’s purely subjective, I think.
It’s always best not to use negative words when speaking of others or groups of people. A lot has to do with context, however, and the character of the speaker. Words aren’t always meant hurtfully.
Great post, Kali. I love your mind and your spirit. Hope you’re feeling well!
‘Mental retardation’ does still show up on forms, unfortunately. It is still how some people speak of developmental disabilities. A search for ‘mental retardation’ on google will bring up a lot of sites talking about developmental disabilities. The connection most definitely has not been severed.
Did ‘retard’ as an epithet ever die? I know I heard it slung around when I was a child.
As for the word ‘crippled’, the problem to me is mostly that it’s used to represent negative things that don’t have to do with physical disabilities. It ends up having attached meanings like ‘useless’, ‘incapable’, ‘broken’, etc – things that are so closely tied to the word ‘cripple’ that it is always colored by them.
On the other hand, for you to choose to apply the word ‘cripple’ or ‘crippled’ to yourself can be a reclamatory act, which I am going to talk about in my third installation of Social Justice language. Hence people who call themselves ‘crips’.
Context is highly important in using language. Most of the words on my list can be used in a way that is not hurtful, either because it is the correct use of the term (ie, saying someone who has trouble seeing things at a distance nearsighted) or because it can be used in a reclamatory way (things like ‘bitch’, ‘slut’, ‘nigga’, ‘crip’, ‘gimp’).
I agree completely that it is best not to use negative words when speaking of others, but I think that’s something that’s beyond most people (in all honesty, myself included). It is at least a step in the right direction to choose less loaded terms.
“Did ‘retard’ as an epithet ever die? I know I heard it slung around when I was a child.”
I really don’t think it did. I’m 30 and have heard it slung around for most of my life. Two of my kids have said it (though, only once in my presence).
I will defer to you on the issue of “crippled”. Personally, I have always considered “cripple” a verb, particularly one that references an act of violence or an inanimate object. “The surgical strike force crippled the army’s ability to launch their attack.” “The engine blew, crippling the bus.” However, the origins are in reference to people and the implication of its contemporary use relates to being broken or ineffective, which is not an appropriate way to refer to a person’s disability.
In regards to “gay,” I have to disagree (mostly). The original meaning of “gay” has nothing to do with sexual orientation. “Gay,” used in that context, is slang–and wasn’t a positive statement to begin with. So, the use of “gay” to refer to something that’s bad or inappropriately feminine is a slang use of a slang term. It’s still inappropriate, but it’s absurd considering the original meaning of the word, which was about merriment or being cheerful.
While it’s true that the original meaning of gay is ‘cheerful, happy’, as you pointed out, that’s not what the newest slang is drawing on. The newest slang is drawing rather explicitly on the sexual orientation meaning. Because of that, I stand by what I said. Calling something bad ‘gay’ codes homosexuality as bad.
I certainly agree that doing that is offensive and should not be done (another thing my kids are not allowed to say), but also wonder why “gay” has been embraced so fully as an appropriate reference to homosexual individuals.
Homosexual is overly clinical, I get that. Most of the other terms are more offensive. But, “gay” as a slang term didn’t start out any more complimentry than some of the others that are slung around.
This by no means is intended to justify using it as slang to mean bad.
Well, according to wikipedia, it was a progression. While I can’t trace it cleanly myself, I can tell you that the bits I do know about make the wiki article seem likely. Gay had a meaning that was…how to put it…free from the dictates of morality, for quite a long time (as in, centuries). It wasn’t a bad thing per se, but it tended to be attached to ideas of pleasure generally.
It was sometimes used in more sexualized tones, sometimes not. Apparently, it started being used to refer to homosexuality in the 1920s, and the word really got solidified to mean homosexuality in the mid-century.
If you ask me, I’d bet that the gay community decided to take that word at least in part because it was so much better than what they’d had before. A lot of the earlier words had a lot more negative baggage attached to them.
(Sorry if that’s not tremendously precise; my study of this particular bit of history was about 6 years ago and I was really studying historiography, only picked up the knowledge on the actual history in working on that)
I agree that “gay” is a lot less nasty than most of the references I’ve heard, but I’ve also heard people within that community (though, obviously not everyone) “own” some of the nastier labels like some people in the black community “own” their own nasty word–which I neither say nor type, even in reference.
I guess part of it is that I really don’t understand this behavior. Why “own” a nasty word when you can make a new word? “Neurodiversity” seems like a much better route to take than re-defining something with so many negative connotations. Sure “neurodiversity” can and has been re-defined to mean something negative that the primary users never intended it to mean, but it’s harder to make that new definition acceptable than it is to revert to an old, unfavorable definition.
Or, maybe it’s that I don’t particularly like slang.