Keith,
> The obvious retort is that the desire to get rid of such powerful
> terms is in the interest of the powerful.
It might be in the interest of being able to talk about serious
instances of oppression if another term is used for cases of stupid
attempts at limiting DVD piracy and the like. Applying powerful terms
broadly makes them less powerful.
> The best example I know of this lingusitic quest to deny authority
> while keep it happens in the social work area: here problems are
> called "experiences" - so, people living in poverty don't actually
> have a "problem", rather, they have an "experience of , Y or Z". The
> social worker then doesn't have to act as if addressing a "problem"
> which takes power from the "victim" - telling starving people they are
> having a negative digestive experience helps them realise that they
> might have an alternative "digestive experience" sometimes called
> "eating".
For better or worse, the social workese you're talking about seems to
come from a serious desire for a general range of positive linguistic
labels. Foremost is people being considered as people who have certain
things happen to them rather than their being a separate category from
the rest of us. (It's a unity thing.) In addition to the
often-obnoxious or clumsy sound of the phrases that result (not "the
disabled" or even "disabled people" but "people with disabilities"
because they are people first) it can result in all of us having a
negative clarity experience.
I'm working on an advocacy brochure for a group that translates text
books for the reading disabled. Not only does my client's boss want to
eliminate such a phrase as "the reading disabled," replacing it with
"people with reading disabilities including people with dyslexia," but
she demands that the argument of the booklet (that publishers should
cooperate in helping people who have serious problems and that those
people do well when given an equal footing) be made without implying
that said people are in any way to be thought of as less than fully
self-reliant and complete without the intervention of ableist creeps.
In other words, the message should be "You ought to help even though
nobody needs your help you capitalist jerks. Screw you."
Gunnar
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