I really do think this is it -- the comparison with you and fjm bring up with "disabled". Right now, in this time and place, "person with disabilities" has become the most common, disability community-approved way of referring to people with disabilities. (Insert obligatory disclaimer here about there being no such thing as the "disability community", and there being a huge subset of people with disabilities who feel no such thing.) But in the future, as you say, steepholm, there will be a combination of changes in language which DO herald changes in attitude, and changes in language which DON'T herald change in attitude, and the end result will be that the word "disability" looks horrendous.
For example, I strongly believe that in the future, I very much suspect that people will be horrified that once autistics were thought of as people with cognitive disabilities, instead of as people with different cognitive processing skills which need to be accommodated in different ways. That will be in attitudinal shift in society.
But at the same time, society will have moved to thinking of the word "disability" as being associated with some kind of horrific treatment ("do you know that people who couldn't walk used to be pushed around in its horrible wheel Victorian contraptions? They were so cruel back then, before they had hoverchairs"), and people who have exactly the same attitudes will think it is horribly evil to use the word "disabled".
In other words, I think that your (steepholm's) shock over the paragraph comes to a certain extent from a disruption of our comfortable beliefs that the changes in language reflect attitudinal changes, but they don't as much as we want to believe.
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Date: 2009-09-14 01:17 pm (UTC)For example, I strongly believe that in the future, I very much suspect that people will be horrified that once autistics were thought of as people with cognitive disabilities, instead of as people with different cognitive processing skills which need to be accommodated in different ways. That will be in attitudinal shift in society.
But at the same time, society will have moved to thinking of the word "disability" as being associated with some kind of horrific treatment ("do you know that people who couldn't walk used to be pushed around in its horrible wheel Victorian contraptions? They were so cruel back then, before they had hoverchairs"), and people who have exactly the same attitudes will think it is horribly evil to use the word "disabled".
In other words, I think that your (steepholm's) shock over the paragraph comes to a certain extent from a disruption of our comfortable beliefs that the changes in language reflect attitudinal changes, but they don't as much as we want to believe.