The s-word
I called a disabled colleague a spaz after hearing he'd spilt coffee over yet another expensive bit of computer kit.... I use the term with irony as someone who was regularly called a "spaz" in the school playground, though I'm visually impaired and not what we once called "a spastic".Because I regularly teach Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and because this year I'm teaching a collection of Flannery O'Connor short stories, I've had plenty of class discussions about racially charged language.
To confuse the issue, a non-disabled colleague had overheard and told me that she found that term offensive and thanked me not to use it in front of her. I was offended that she was offended because I didn't feel it was her place to be offended... after all, it's not her word and she wouldn't have been taunted with it. --Damon Rose --The s-word (BBC News)
Lately I've been spending time in each literature class introducing the concept of disability studies, in part because physical characteristics such as missing limbs or scars are often used by authors as a short of shortcut to characterization.
But hearing that a company recently marketed a wheelchair called the "Spazzo" makes me completely confused. Perhaps I shouldn't be.
At any rate, this article reminds me that language is power, and that terms used by mainstream society to label subgroups, and terms used by subgroups to refer to themselves are often points of conflict.
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I've never heard of "spaz" being used to describe someone with physical disabilities. It's always been a description of emotional behavior - someone who get overly excited overly often. Like your stereotypical pre-teen girl - OMG!!! Ponies! OMG!!! Barbie got a new haircut! OMG!!!! You're not wearing that, are you? I'm never talking to you again! On a differnet note, in line with my thinking, I think this is funny: "Re-inforcing a negative stereotype is never acceptable even if the victim accepts the abusive comment. It is still abuse." Doesn't this person realize that by making an issue out of the word, it reinforces the negative stereotype? I was suprised, almost shocked, to find that the more time I spent listening to lecture on the evils of racism, the more I felt people of a different race must be fundamentally different. I don't actually believe that, but the feeling does creep in - if someone is making such a big, emotional deal over a subject, it must be important, right?