Hacker News Reader

> If you break your legs and spend a few months in a wheelchair, you might not feel legitimate to use the term "disabled" in comparison to someone who has never been able to walk and suffers more from it.

I would say "I am hungry" even if I have food in the fridge, I do not need to compare myself to poor starving people and decide to say "I am currently hungry" or "I am in a situation of hunger"

> Not letting that disabilty define you as a person. I am not disabled, I am Sunderw, a complicated person with many different aspects.

also I am still a complicated person and hungry does not define my personality.

> Including more person means reducing stigma and reducing the gap between abled/disabled.

Actually, taking too many steps to think of how to describe a person with a certain medical situation already increases the stigma, I would feel more bad if people try to avoid calling me "sick" so I don't feel bad about being sick, this is even worse.

Imagine calling a midget "A person with less height" or some nonsense like that.

> I would say "I am hungry" even if I have food in the fridge, I do not need to compare myself to poor starving people and decide to say "I am currently hungry" or "I am in a situation of hunger"

But saying "I'm starving!" when you are just hungry is a bit different. It's fine where there are no starving people around. It's just a exaggeration then. But if one of your friends starved last week while you are still fat and just a bit hungry it might not sound well.

The problem is that you let your friend starve, not that you used a wrong word. The humanity allocates too little money to medical research.

You can have more than one problem at the same time.

'Solving' the 'problem' of words only makes you feel good about yourself and gives you the feeling that you are helping somehow while actually doing nothing.

Well, the difference may come from the language. "I am hungry" translates in french to "J'ai faim" using the "have" auxiliary. You "are" hungry in english, but I "have" the hunger, in french.

So for me your example does not count as a label. Is there no nuance at all between "being hungry" and "being disabled" in english ? If so, you're right, my argument does not stand.

> Imagine calling a midget "A person with less height" or some nonsense like that.

I think midget is pejorative so this is not a very good example. But I don't know much about that so I'll take your argument as if it wasn't at all.

I should have added that this is of course useful in some contexts. If you are talking to a specific person, then changing the language isn't very useful (except if this specific person feels the term is offensive, but that does not mean we should all change how we speek).

Where it is more useful, for example, is when you talk about limitations due to a problem. You are writing an article about height problems ? No need to say it's about dwarfism, there are other small people that might relate. You're a store and design a special help to get objects on high shelves ? No need to call it "dwarf help" or "midget help", but just "help for small people" or even "high shelf help".

In this case this is not about thinking about how to describe a person with a certain medical situation. It is about taking a step back and removing the medical situation altogether.

This applies much more to "deaf"/"hearing impaired" (or whatever, my argument is about generalizing, not about a specific term). A lot more people have difficulty hearing than are completely deaf.

Knowing about it is good. Trying to think about what your language implies is good. Forbidding the usage of words is obviously extreme and bad.

> - Not letting that disabilty define you as a person. I am not disabled, I am Sunderw, a complicated person with many different aspects.

The flip side of this is that it allows / encourages others to see your disability as a mere "inconvenience" or something that should be able to be separated from you. I find at least for people I know with mental health disabilities they feel "person with X" tends to lead very quickly into "I know you have X but why can't you just be/do/deal with Y". In fact, I have a general theory (untested) that where someone with a disability falls on the "I am a person with X" vs "I am X" is probably directly proportional to how much X is a strong defining factor in their lives. I notice this particularly in ADHD and Autism spectrum disorders, where being on the "less support needs" side of the spectrum tends to be described as "I have ADHD / Autism" but being on the side of the spectrum that requires more suppoed "I am ADHD / Autistic" is more common. And for those I know who prefer the "I am X" format, part of that is because, paraphrased "this is a major part of my life that fundamentally alters how I live and interact with the world and I need people to understand that about me"

Obviously to a large degree this depends on your language having an adjective form in the first place e.g. we have yet to come up with "I am cancered", though in a related way we often. see "I am a cancer survivor" / "I am fighting cancer", but it's still relatively common even for bad cases to be "I have cancer".

I'm supportive of all those goals, I just don't see how person-first language does anything for them. Does "he's a person with visual impairment" really stigmatize a person less than "he's blind"? Or does "he's blind" really one-dimensionally define a person? It seems to me that stigmas are not bourne out of language, and that a blind person is their own person seems understood and implied no matter the language that's used. If I say "sunderw's French" then it's also understood that you're more than just "French" and that your "Frenchness" does not singularly define you.

You can construct some armchair psychology arguments such as "the language explicitly acknowledges that there's more to a person", but does that really affect people's thinking in any significant way? And if it does, does it affect the thinking in the right way? Or does it trivialize the condition? No matter what language you use, being blind is a serious handicap and it really does affect what you can and can't do in this world; trying to euphemize the very real problems blind people face also isn't a good idea.