We are all handicapped--at times disabled by a language that cannot escape cruel stereotypes

A week or two ago the California Assn. of the Physically Handicapped met in Los Angeles, and a few days before the convention I received a letter from Jane Small-Sanford, program chairman, asking my help in seeking a more sensitive language for describing those with disabilities.

“Your fascination with language has prompted me to write you,” she wrote. “I hope you will be sensitive to the anger felt by many persons with disabilities when they are described in print and on radio and television in ways that create negative verbal stereotypes.

“Language can be a potent force for good or evil; discarding negative verbal stereotypes as they are applied to persons with disabilities would be a major breakthrough in the struggle by persons with disabilities to be accepted within the community as peers. . . .”

Words now in use, she argues, tend to “disempower” men and women with disabilities. For example, invalid , which means not valid, or null and void; cripple derived from the Old English “to creep”; and handicapped , from “cap in hand, as used to refer to a beggar.” (Actually, handicap derives from an old gambling game in which the stakes were held in a cap.)

She points out that people who use wheelchairs are not “confined” to them, but are mobile because they use them. She adds that words such as stricken , victim , abnormal or deformed perpetuate false ideas.

“Stereotyped images make persons with disabilities seem less than human. They play upon pity and stimulate illusions of inadequacy. They define people by their disabilities. People may have disabilities; society provides the handicaps by viewing them not as they are but as they may appear. Persons with disabilities are not heroic nor are they pitiful. They are first and foremost people .”

Surely any sensitive person must sympathize with Small-Sanford’s plea. But the difficulty of the problem is implicit in her own language. She indicates that handicapped is unsatisfactory; but the very title of the association she represents suggests that they have been able to find no more suitable word.

Throughout her letter, in describing the kind of persons she means, she uses the word disabled . Yet surely disabled is too broad a word for the merely handicapped. Disability may be trifling or total. A person lying in a coma is disabled; so is a baseball pitcher with a bruised little finger.

It is to the credit of the American people that we have come as far as we have in the last two decades in clearing our language of cruel epithets. Racial slurs are almost never seen in print or heard on radio or television. A part of the genius of any language is its capacity for cruelty; schoolchildren quickly learn its power. Yet, mostly, we seek the words that are kind, or at least fair.

When I was a boy anyone who was physically disabled in the arms or legs was a cripple. Today, the word is not heard, except in its modifying forms--”a crippling accident,” or “he was crippled.”

If we remember Small-Sanford’s axiom, that persons with disabilities are first and foremost people, we do not have to refer to their disabilities at all. But what if their disabilities are relevant? May we not be obliged to say that they use a wheelchair, or are bedridden, or blind? Or that they have multiple sclerosis, or palsy, or paralysis?

We can’t keep backing away from the truth with one euphemism after another. We no longer refer to people who can’t hear and consequently can’t speak well as deaf and dumb. We no longer even refer to people as deaf. They are hearing-impaired. I can understand eliminating the old “deaf and dumb,” which is thoughtless and cruel; but if a person is stone deaf, how does it improve his feelings to call him hearing-impaired?

It is accepted now, and I don’t wish to try to discredit it, but it seemed an intrusion on the integrity of the language to me when they began to call certain handicapped children “exceptional”; until then, exceptional had always meant superior, and it took some getting used to in the new context.

It seems to me that in handicapped we have hit upon perhaps the best all-purpose word. It is not pejorative. We all have handicaps of one kind or another. It is flexible. A handicap can be almost insurmountable, or it can be so trivial as to be merely a spur to do one’s best. After all, the best horses will still win with the heaviest handicaps.

Many great performers have had some kind of handicap. Demosthenes, the greatest of Greek orators, had a speech impediment as a boy; he overcame it by reciting verses with pebbles in his mouth.

Now if even the members of the California Assn. of the Physically Handicapped decide that handicapped is cruel, and stereotypes the disabled in some less than human way, what name indeed do we give to those who have lost limbs or mobility or sanity in the wear and tear of life?

Handicapped still seems the least offensive. It applies to all of us.

Few of us leave the house in the morning without some kind of a handicap: a headache, a hangover, a nasty temper, an aching back; but most of us, when we can’t find a parking space at the bank or supermarket, will still not use the open space marked “Handicapped Only.”

It is a word that has won our respect.