Member-only story
Changing Words is Hard
Using the right words is not especially easy. I should know; I help people do that for a living. I also try to make words do things to say stuff and express my feelings.
Content warning: I allude to slurs in this piece, citing a couple of them, and also discuss ableism.
Sometimes those feelings are angry, contemptuous, dismissive, or that sort of thing. It’s useful to have ways to belittle or express aggression towards people — say, for political reasons, or to express helplessness, fear; there’s a constellation of reasons to embrace both negative emotions and negative communication.
When that happens, it’s easy to reach for words like “idiot,” “moron,” “stupid,” and other things. But the origins of these words and their deployment in modern speech is often against people with disabilities — or those perceived as inferior. In the same way as calling someone “blind” to express that they’re actually being stubborn, making a bad decision, or deliberately ignoring something is actually inaccurate, it also demeans people with visual impairments.
There’s been a popular push to stop using slurs — first and most easily, of course, is the n word (with or without a hard r on the end; if you don’t know which word “the n word” is, you’re probably beyond my help). The word “retard” and “faggot” are also falling out of use, and have been for…
