Topics Language

Question Many people would agree that to use the word "gay" as a term meaning "bad" is disrespectful, or even homophobic. Only slightly fewer people hold a similar view of the word "retarded." However, there are also people who take a stronger position, according to which words like "insane" and "lame" are similarly degrading and inappropriate (I've heard these words described as "ableist"). Although the stronger position strikes me as incorrect, I can't say why. Is there any way to draw a distinction between the use of words like "gay" and words like "insane" as generally pejorative terms? Or will we one day agree that all such usage is comparable to racist or sexist language? What is it exactly that makes such usage problematic?

Accepted:
April 22, 2010

Comments

Words have meanings, but they also have histories. The term "Paddy Wagon" is defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as "an enclosed motortruck used by police to carry prisoners." That definition is adequate, if all you want to know is what people are talking about when they use that term. But if this definition is all you ever know about the term, you will be baffled by the fact that people of Irish descent usually take offense when they hear that term used. To understand why they have that reaction, you need to know where that expression came from. You need to know that "paddy" is a derogatory way of referring to an Irish person or a person of Irish descent, and you need to know that there used to be (and maybe still is) a stereotyped belief that people of Irish descent are more likely than others to drink heavily and to become rowdy and disorderly -- so disorderly that police must come and pick them up by the "wagon"-load. Originally, bigoted people who used the expression "paddy wagon" to refer to a police truck were expressing their contempt for people of Irish descent, without having to explicitly assert it. An Irish or Irish-American person who heard someone using the term "paddy wagon" would have been absolutely right to be offended by it -- even though the term purported to be nothing more than a way of referring to a particular kind of vehicle, it was really conveying an insult.

Now many people who today use that expression have no idea about its history. They do not mean to be expressing contempt for people of Irish ancestry -- how could they mean this, if they don't even know that the term has such connotations? Nonetheless, if someone -- say, me -- uses the term, the term's sordid history is going to be evoked for people who do know about it -- especially for people of Irish descent. And since that history is a painful one -- like many of the people immigrating to the United States over the years, people coming from Ireland suffered terribly discrimination and ill-treatment -- simply hearing the word becomes itself a painful experience. They may therefore mount a kind of campaign to take the word out of common usage, explaining to people who don't know why they find the word hurtful. Once I learn all this, it seems to me that I ought to simply stop using it.

Words or phrases like "paddy wagon" have become for many of us dead metaphors; that is, they do contain some descriptive or connotative material, but we don't pay any attention to it. If we did attend to this, we might realize that these terms and phrases allude to negative stereotypes. To "jew someone down" -- to cut a particularly shrewd deal -- alludes to the stereotype of Jewish people as money-grubbers, operating at the margins of honesty. (It's not quite to "gyp" them -- to actually cheat them -- as Gypsies do, according to bigots.) I don't know the etymology of "Dutch treat", but I would not be surprised to learn that it invokes some negative stereotype of people of Dutch descent.

But there are other words where no amount of reflection on their descriptive content can reveal why they are a source of offense to some people. Consider the derogatory word "kike". The etymology is uncertain (see Wikipedia for some speculations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kike ), but it doesn't seem to attribute any negative property or allude to any stereotypical picture of Jewish people. In this case, what is offensive to people of Jewish descent is that the word was used specifically to convey contempt for them. The term "Jew", a term that Jewish people use to refer to themselves, was rejected in favor of a term invented by others so as to signal hatred or contempt. The story is the same for the term "nigger". That word exists in the language in order for bigots to express their bigotry in an efficient way.

What about terms like "handicapped" or "retarded"? These represent yet a third kind of case. Here the illustrative parallel is with the terms "Negro" and "black". Even if "Negro" did not function, as "nigger" did, to specifically express contempt for people of African ancestry, still the term was alien -- that is, it is not a term that people of African ancestry chose to designate themselves. Also, the term was associated with a period of history in which people of African ancestry were subject to brutal subordination. The process of rejecting the alien term in favor of a freely chosen self-designation was part of the process of rejecting the whole system of segregation and the ideology of racism with which the term "Negro" was historically associated.

If people with cognitive disabilities tell me that they find the term "retarded" alien, or that it evokes for them a painful history of discrimination and ill treatment, I ought to listen. Ditto for "insane," and "lame." After all, what, in the end, does it cost me? A little self-consciousness until I form a new linguistic habit. Big deal.