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I appreciate your response. Can you elaborate on the juxtaposition of being mentally ill. and considering yourself normal? This is not clear to me in your response.

I suffer from mental illness as well (a disability), and I certainly don’t consider myself normal. I’ve overcome my issues, and I’m perfectly happy talking about my experience at/in appropriate times/places. I just acknowledge that the average person within the realm of normal can’t relate to my experience.

Coincidentally, I get the most relatable feedback doing inspirational speaking at homeless shelters; there’s nothing about my life today that would indicate they consider me normal in their sphere. I’m all for learning to use the right language when talking to folks with disabilities, and your comment here seems insightful. I’m just not making the connection you’re trying to build.

I think I’ve chosen language that doesn’t communicate well. It makes sense to me in my head, but the HN crowd doesn’t seem to follow what I mean. :-)

Fundamentals: the social model essentially places the onus of accommodating disability on society as a whole rather than the disabled individual. A simple example is the difference between asking a person who cannot walk to climb stairs vs providing a ramp. The stairs represent the typical medical model (the disabled individual must adapt to how society works) and the ramp is the social model (society should adapt to how disabled people work).

It’s not so much about being normal as it is about _feeling_ normal. Viewing the world through the lens of the social model allows me to say, “this situation could be better” rather than “I could be better”. This is important became sometime the latter is impossible — there are features of my body that cannot be improved.

I’m pragmatic about this, BTW. I don’t think we should rebuild every aspect of society to accommodate the minutia of disability. I think it should be an aspirational value that we hold and act on when we can.

Does that help? I can talk about mental health in this context as well, it’s just a lot to put into a single post. :-)

Ah yes, much better, thank you. It's a ripe area for technological improvements. In the same way the video chat is better than the alternative of asynchronous written communication (not to say I don't love a handwritten letter) tech will mostly be a boon in this area.

I’m really excited about AI as a boon for accessibility.

Example: chronic pain messes with your ability to recall. These days I have more trouble recalling facts than I used to. This makes programming hard, as much as programming is about intuition and problem solving, it also depends on memorizing a lot of facts (what was that built-in function called again…?)

I started using Copilot a few months ago and, while I almost always reject Copilot’s suggestions, it’s been amazing for remembering names of things. For me it’s been much better than an IDE (for example) because it presents the things I have trouble remembering with some context code.

> impairments as being abnormal and negative

That’s why you call them impairments. (From Late Latin peiorare "make worse”.)

The point is that physical impairments, while real, shouldn't matter all that much. We'll all be physically impaired to a greater or lesser extent as we age. Social impairment however matters a great deal, because it's next to impossible to live a healthy and fulfilling life if you can't relate to others on a reasonably equal basis. Of course trying to enforce this on everyone else with "person-first" language is a total non-starter, but the basic insight found in the "social model" is quite valuable and in fact something that classical authors were already familiar with.

I've been asthmatic because of allergies practically all my life. It's normal for me, but since childhood it was always clear to me that having allergies and being asthmatic is an impairment, it's not normal for most people to be hindered by it.

The good news is that after middle age, my immune systems seems to have mellowed, so now I actually can do normal things my condition precluded me from, like eating avocados or shrimps, for example.

> I would not have survived the last few years if I had characterized my impairments as being abnormal and negative. [..] Happy to answer any questions if you have ‘em!

Why not? I have several traits I consider abnormal, and some I consider negative (i.e. unlike the merely abnormal ones, I wish to overcome them. And some cannot be overcome but are very normal - e.g. mortality.) - why should that characterization impair my effort or desire to survive and thrive? Or rather, why does it impair yours?

> There’s an approach out there called the “social model” of disability where impairment is regarded as a neutral (neither good nor bad) experience and the good or bad experience is how the impairment changes interaction with society.

If I may speculate, is this the answer? You want to be seen as good and desirable by society, so if any of the multiple meanings of a word used to describe you carry negative implications, that results in a reduction of your self-worth? Even when a word is merely objective description, used without moral baggage, its mere proximity to alternate meanings taints it?

As a disabled person myself. It is both abnormal and negative. I don't care about any specific wording used to describe me beyond the ability to allow clear and succinct communication.

A jerk is going to be a jerk regardless of the specific syllables used so why trip up well meaning people.

It’s interesting that so much focus is on getting people who are likely we’ll meaning but don’t keep up with the nuance. Heard someone called a bigot because they used the word Latina instead of the correct latinx. If you knew them you’d know they have family of diverse backgrounds so may not have even known the right word and likely didn’t mean “harm”

Latinx can never be the right word.

>instead of the correct latinx

It was my impression the word latinx was generally mocked by people it's supposed to represent.

I believe the new in vogue term is "Latine"

Thanks that is helpful. Is this clearly accepted enough to correct native speakers for example when proofing copy?

The correct name for a group of Latino people is Latinos, or Latinas if the whole group are known to be women.

How is that any different than just saying “Latin” … I’m genuinely trying to think of how this might be pronounced, particularly with an eye towards American regional accents and yeah… it’s not great.

Latine:

- Lah-teen … rhymes white latrine

- Lat-ein-e … normal “lat”, Germanic pronunciation of “ein”, like the number one or Einstein, “e” pronounced either “ee” or “eh”

- Latin-e … latin-ee, rhymes with matinee,

- lat-tine … lah-tine as in the tines of a fork.

Or my favourite

- Latin-e … just “latin” but spelled with a silent “e”.

This is less than ideal… outside of using mispronunciation as a shibboleth, you normally want a group identifying word to be clearly identified and picked up by any possible group members regardless of if they have heard someone speak it. You want such words to be easily used by the people who identify with it, also crucially it’s self-adoption by the group that is being identified that matters… If no one you would call latine likes you calling them latine, or latinx, or Latino or Latina or Latin… you probably should just ask them what they want and call them that instead, that’s just my opinion from over in Australia where this particular identity/word fight appears to have mostly gone unnoticed against our own local issues.

It's a Spanish word (a neologism, of course, used by a small minority of speakers at present), so pronounce it like any other Spanish word:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/latine#Pronunciation_3

Admittedly the question of how to pronounce a Spanish word in English is non-trivial and subsumes the question of how to pronounce Spanish and the question of how to pronounce English ... but apart from that no special case is required for the word "latine"!

I was born in Central America and while not a comprehensive sample, I don’t know a single person where I’m from who doesn’t think this an American imposed thing that’s trying to fix our “wrong” culture.

Negative feedback after correcting a native speaker is either evidence of the sexiest bigoted Latinx culture - or evidence of a type of cultural imperialism depending on where you stand on these issues. I just wish folks could draw clearer connections to the harm of using Latina vs latinx

What harm?

It offends upper middle class, privileged white women with questionably valid university degrees in the Humanities and a value system based around the extremely questionable critical theory, rather than the extremely successful for humanity method we know as reason (or the less successful but at least proven to mostly not implode and utterly destroy society method of religious conservatism)

It is an American imposed thing that's trying to fix your "wrong" culture. It doesn't even make grammatical sense.

>used the word Latina instead of the correct latinx.

It's not the "correct" term, and almost nobody I know of takes it seriously outside of really, really narrow little social media woke bubbles. If someone is a woman and of latin american origin, they will almost universally refer to themselves as latina and not care if others do. What idiotic nonsense to assume that something else is "correct" despite it going against the grain of a vast majority's word use.

I live in Latin America and have latin american family of all kinds. This aside from many friendships of both sexes and variable gender identifications too.

In America, barely any (2%) of the Latino population identify with it, yet it gets pushed anyway. In fact, 40% are actively bothered by it. Forcing use of it is such a bizarre hill to die on.

https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000017d-81be-dee4-a5ff-efbe7...

It's a tool of social positioning, and helps an academic precariat oust incumbents in fields where there really aren't a lot of positions and whose degrees are good for little but academia or being political commissars at organizations that actually do something useful.

I am also disabled and it's a farce to pretend that it isn't abnormal and negative. We're in the era of pretending we don't know things we know and its asinine. I really hope modernity survives this era of enforced stupidity.

Western society is reverting to one which bases consensus on feelings rather than reason.

Just in case you don't realize it, those of us who are not disabled are quite fond of people like you who are that are able to hold this viewpoint instead of insisting on the nu-speak.

Carlin's bit on soft language has, sadly, never been more relevant than today.