He Can’t Quite Come to Terms With Latest Euphemisms

As I have noted from time to time, we are suffering an epidemic of euphemisms invented to shield various minorities from insensitive labels.

Surely most of them are inspired by good intentions and indeed are useful in sparing the feelings of those they are meant to protect.

Handicapped is a happy example; surely it is much more humane than crippled , which it has almost entirely replaced. The word handicap implies a challenge, while conceding a disability.

However handicapped is not among the new wave of such euphemisms. It has been around for years. That’s the trouble. When new words or phrases are thought up to disguise or soften their meanings, they quickly become known for what they are; their disguise is penetrated and their function is lost.

Thus, handicapped is now in disfavor with some of those who work with the handicapped, though I have never heard a complaint from a handicapped person himself. Believe it or not, the vogue phrase for handicapped is differently abled . If ever a euphemism was doomed to quick extinction, surely it is this one.

A contemporary of differently abled is differently challenged , which arises, evidently, from handicapped. A handicapped person is challenged because of some disability, and must respond in different ways, or by trying harder. That is exactly what handicapped means.

Some years ago those who work with retarded children decided to call them exceptional, simply usurping that word from other children who might deserve it for other reasons. Evidently the word is still in use in that appropriated sense, but it is lost in the sense of especially bright, creative or gifted.

There is no use complaining about the loss of exceptional , any more than there is in deploring the loss of gay , which has been commandeered by homosexuals as their accepted epithet. As long as they are comfortable with it, one cannot cavil, but there is no word in the language that quite takes its place in general use. One no longer speaks of a friend or a party as being gay, unless one means homosexual. That’s the way the ball bounces.

Differently abled is only one of several neologisms created to soften the impact of disabled. Others include uniquely abled, handicapable, inconvenienced, injury survivors and people with differing abilities.

Writing recently in U.S. News & World Report, John Leo noted that, according to this movement, Porky Pig, a stutterer, is speech-impaired, Mr. Magoo is visually handicapped, and Capt. Hook is orthopedically impaired.

People who have some loss of sight are visually impaired, and people who have some loss of hearing are hearing-impaired, but, alas, the blind are blind, and the deaf are deaf.

Leo notes that this phenomenon has rules within rules. “ ‘Colored people,’ as in NAACP, is racist, but the backward construction ‘people of color,’ is progressive.”

We had no sooner learned that those who lived in America when Columbus arrived should be called Native Americans, not American Indians, than we learned that both terms are despised, because they contain the hated European word American; they must now be called indigenous peoples (which does not distinguish them from indigenous peoples anywhere else in the world).

Even animal rights activists are in the act. Leo notes that the word pet is demeaning, and should be replaced by animal companion . If it is demeaning to call a dog pet it must be even more demeaning for one to call his beloved pet , as in “Would you get me a Scotch and soda, pet?”

But even animal companion is suspect, he notes, because it suggests that humans are distinct from the rest of the animal world. That is what is known as speciesism .

Writing in the New Republic, Kay Sunstein Hymowitz notes that “the latest minority to join the plethora of ethnic, sexual, and cultural groups now seeking the status of victimhood are, yes, witches.”

“The Anti-Bias Curriculum,” a publication of the National Assn. for the Education of Young Children, states that witches have “suffered too long from disparaging prejudice.” The book advises teachers to explain that “Halloween witches are not evil hags who like to eat children . . . but actually good women who use herbal remedies to really help people.”

Meanwhile, I was enlightened to find in Ms. magazine that prostitutes are now called sex workers . Evidently that means that they are to be thought of as taking their place with other women in the work force.

I feel rather ignored. I am a member of what seems to me the only remaining group that is not protected against insensitivity. I am a MASH--a male Anglo-Saxon heterosexual.

If witches and prostitutes can be protected, why not me?