Word Assocations

[steepholm]

I've been trying to catch up with the TLS, and last night was taken with one their occasional "Then And Now" features. In this case it was reprinting an article first published in 1918 on the subject of "Jung and Word Association". It was an interesting piece altogether, but what leapt out at me was the following sentence:

The book also contains material of great value for comparing the average reactions of the uneducated with those of the mentally deficient; there are probably very many cases in which the defective represents, not the sins of his fathers or a freak of nature, but a failure of our present civilization to provide the educational opportunities that would give expression to the more unusual, and perhaps not the less valuable, types of mind.

I found it quite hard to process the fact that such un-PC language was being used to make what is, if one can press on to the end of the sentence, such an enlightened thought. To pick only the most obvious problem, was the writer really unaware of the problems involved in describing someone as a defective while also maintaining that their minds may be just as valuable as anyone else's? Did they really have such a tin ear? Or is it our own generation that, having thought so much about the ways in which privilege and prejudice are embedded in language, is unusually sensitive to such matters? (Or has our insensitivity simply moved to different spheres less visible to us, for future generations to hoot and tut at?)

Comments

[deborah]

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.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Autism is an example which brings up a lot of the complexities in this whole discussion - in part I suppose because of the huge variation in people at different ends of the spectrum. A friend's brother was severely autistic, and viewing him as having merely different cognitive processing skills really doesn't work as it does for someone at the Asperger's end of the spectrum.

In terms of an attitudinal shift, I wonder whether another possibility might be that some mental illnesses might be viewed as disabilities or defects but the attitude towards having a brain which handles its chemicals defectively isn't at all loaded? Personally I'd be happy saying my brain kind of conked out on the fighting off depression front and yes, it's not working right now without antidepressants, and therefore it's defective. And what of it? Rather than trying to change the language to avoid saying it's anything about my brain which is in any way 'wrong', it's to view that defect as no more significant than the same brain's migraineiness. But it has exactly as little to do with society's inability to accommodate those differences/defects in each case. (Granted, my depression is far from being a major disability, but I've worn out B's willingness to okay every comment which mentions her atm!)

[deborah]

see, I used autism very intentionally, because as technology improves it's become increasingly clear that many people with extremely severe autism really are incredibly intelligent (not in the Rainman savant sense), but communicate differently from neurotypicals -- so very differently that it seems like communication is impossible. And suddenly in the last few years the technology that enables neurotypical and autistics to communicate is becoming available.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting question as to which leads the way, language change heralding changes in attitude, or vice versa. Both, I guess, at various times and places. The example I gave shows an attitude changing, but the language lagging behind, and I just wondered whether that's likely to happen less in an age when various movements from "political correctness" to advertising have made us hyper-aware of the rhetorical power of terminology. But maybe not. "Disabled" has already been mentioned, but I was thinking about "person of colour" the other day, which as far as I can see is the designation of choice in large parts of the internet, but which I've always instinctively fought shy of because it "normalizes" being white. That bothers me, but I don't remember hearing the objection being made elsewhere, and don't feel it's my place to make myself, other than musing on my own LJ of course. (For all that, I'm sure it has been made.)

[deborah]

my general rule is to use the language that the community in question chooses to use to describe itself. As far as "people of color", I have seen people talk about how it makes whiteness normative, but I think it is currently considered to be a more positive description the negative descriptions of "nonwhite", "minority", etc.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes, that seems the only rule that makes practical sense. As for "nonwhite" and "minority", they're even worse - the first normalizing whiteness even more blatantly, and the second being simply untrue (most people aren't white, after all).

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thinking about it, the problem is perhaps more structural, in that the very fact that we feel the need to have a word to describe people who aren't white implies a specialness about whiteness that's not going to be erased by the choice of one term over another. Of course, many groups have words to describe people who aren't members of their own group (e.g. goy) but they tend to be used by the group themselves rather than as self-descriptors by the people to whom they're applied. Arguably it's a sign of white-normativity that people who aren't white feel the need to find a term to describe their own non-whiteness.

This comes out of a conversation with Lady_S last night in which I found myself asking what, say, a blind person, a person in a wheelchair and a person with bipolar have in common, apart from being expected to tick the 'Disabled' box on forms. Since their circumstances and the help they may require are all quite different, what is the point of grouping them under a general label, other than to reinforce the normative position of people without those conditions?

NB There may be very good answers to those questions, but I've not thought of them yet!