Apparently the disability rights movement is beginning to be taken
seriously.  It seems that our leaders are now being held to the same
standards applied to everyone else.  last month, disability leaders
marched into a meeting with the editorial board of one of the largest
newspapers in the country, the Chicago Sun times.  Instead of focusing on
the lack of affordable, accessible housing, the extremely high
unemployment rate, the lack of adequate and accessible transportation,
the need to support self-employment among the disabled, or the problems
with inaccessible technology, they focused their time on the use of the
word handicapped and the occasional failure to use people first language.
the problem occurred when no one at the newspaper could find any
dictionary with a definition or entomology of the word "handicapped" with
the meaning or history they claimed.  As the column below suggests, the
politically correct police had few answers why what they claimed was not
documented in the major reference works.

Just like Neil has no problem being called a Jew, feel free to call me
blind.  Unlike some, I won't excoriate those that do.

Kelly

Chicago Sun times


Nothing shameful about meaning of 'handicapped'
December 28, 2001
BY NEIL STEINBERG
SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Myself, I don't like being referred to as a "drunk.'' So harsh. So
judgmental. I prefer "bon vivant'' or "hale fellow well met'' or even
"boozehound,'' which I first heard used by the writer Tad Friend,
describing
to me the office atmosphere at Spy magazine. "Boozehound'' has such a
friendly, canine ring to it, and certainly captures the eager lap-lap-lap
that we inebriates tend to do in the presence of liquor.

That said, I would never dream of traipsing around trying to pressure
others
not to use the term "drunk''--I mean, I'd appreciate it if they didn't
fling
the word in my face, but otherwise it's a free country where the
domination
of the strong and the efficient is not limited to language.

These thoughts ran through my mind during a rather lengthy meeting with a
group of handicapped people who stopped by the paper to air their
unhappiness with those who would even subtly suggest that, for instance,
not
being able to see or walk is a bad thing. I made the faux pas of
referring
to such people as "handicapped.'' Silly me. "Handicapped,'' I was
informed,
is the language of ignorance and hate, as outdated as "cripple.'' The new
term of choice is "people with disabilities.''

Someone more judicious than myself would have at this point hung his head
in
mock shame and murmured the requisite apologies. But I was emboldened by
simple curiosity and what seemed an inversion of logic. Why was
"disabled''
a better term than "handicapped?'' I told them that, as a writer, if I
had
to pick the offensive word, I would have chosen "disabled,'' for its
surface
meaning-- dis able, or un-able. It's practically the same word as
invalid--invalid, not valid, get it? And even a person as cold-hearted as
myself (I prefer "cold-hearted'' to the more succinct "utter bastard''
though, again, it's a free country) would never suggest that someone is
not
a full person just because he has, ummm, difficulties. What precisely, I
asked them, is wrong with "handicapped''?

I was given a quick etymology. "Handicap'' is from "handy with the
cap''--and here several guests mimicked the doffing of a cap. It's a
throwback, they said, to those vanished days when disabled people sat
around
doffing their caps, begging for coins.

Here again, a person looking to minimize the hassles of life would have
said
something like, "The scales fall from my eyes!'' or "I did not know
that.''
What I actually blurted out was, "That can't be true!''

A dictionary was sent for. And it turns out--surprise, surprise--that it
indeed is not true. "Handicap''--as anyone who plays the ponies
knows--began, not as a description of the otherly abled, but as a horse
racing term. Ironically, it implies superiority, since the handicaps were
weights placed on the better horses, not the worse ones, so as to make
for a
closer race. In that sense it's a compliment.

But facts don't matter in these situations. "Handicapped'' could have
really
meant "worthy of all entitlements'' in Sanskrit and nothing would change.
This wasn't being put forward for debate. I, not being a member of the
community, did not have any input. Rather my visitors, draped in the
moral
authority that comes--I'm sorry here, I know how the word rankles--from
suffering had, in their eyes, the right to lay down the law. The fact
that I
didn't agree with them, frankly, did not seem to register.

Maybe it is failure on my part to empathize. If, while out on a spree (a
term I prefer much more than "bender'' or "alcoholic episode'') I were to
stumble under a bus and have my legs crushed, I would not say I had
disabled
myself. That would make me sound like the bomb at the end of a James Bond
film. I'd say I had crippled myself, and no one would disagree with me,
because I'd be the guy in the chair.

I like to think--perhaps I am flattering myself here--I would not be too
terribly concerned with what term was used to describe my condition. I
would
be far, far more interested that there were sufficient curb cuts, and
kneeling buses, and accessible buildings and adequate health care--issues
that were hardly touched upon during our conversation about exactly what
euphemisms should be applied to which conditions.

I love words. But they can be a time-wasting trap. In all the annals of
the
progress of the civil rights movement, I do not know of any particular
importance given the shift from "negro'' to "black'' to "African
American''
to "person of color''--a loop back, in my eyes, to the old "colored,''
which, from a poetic standpoint, is probably the best word of all, having
neither the morbid associations of "black'' or the space-eating geography
of
"African-American.'' Isn't it just a question of fashion?

Since the Internet gives these columns a unique life of their own, and
they
are shipped from one outraged party to another, as they work themselves
up
into a frothing Group Hate over someone who takes exception to their
party
line, I should end by adding that the Americans With Disabilities Act is
a
lovely thing, a symbol of how disenfranchised groups can muscle
themselves
into the mainstream.

But the mainstream is a rough place. You can't argue that you are both a
fully equal, unencumbered member of society andpart of a special victim
class entitled to finesse the language any way you please.

One last example. I call myself a Jew. In many quarters, "Jew'' has a
negative connotation, such as "jewing'' down a price. Yet how would it be
if
I went around demanding that, because of its cultural baggage, "Jew'' was
out, and "Non-Arab Semite'' or "God's Chosen People'' or some such thing
was
now our term of choice? It would be ridiculous. Exactly.


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