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Comment by nyanmatt | Hacker News Reader

“With autism”

A large portion of the autistic community is very against this phrasing. Autism is not a disease you carry, or something you “have”.

It should be used as an adjective to describe a person:

“Autistic people less likely to succumb to bystander effect”

Edit: If you follow through to the actual paper referenced you can see they use the correct phrasing.

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And yet, the clinical standard has been to use the "with" terminology for a long time now. For exactly the general reason that you present, just with your grammatical paradigm inverted.

The fact is that anyone can copy and paste "offense" complaints and insert any grammar that they want into ad-lib spaces.

What the ASD community could use less of is individuals utilizing it as their political arena.

> And yet, the clinical standard has been to use the "with" terminology for a long time now. For exactly the general reason that you present, just with your grammatical paradigm inverted.

If that's the clinical standard, why didn't the cited paper use it that way? From the research paper:

> autistic individuals

> autistic employees

> autistic participants

The peer reviewed research paper uses this standard. Only using "with" in reference to diagnoses.

It is "Science Daily", a news site, who skirts the standard by changing the paper's wording.

I'm a brown haired person. I'm also a person with brown hair. Neither phrasing makes my brown hair a disease I carry.

That’s a totally false comparison. Brown hair is something you physically have.

Technically so is autism if you want to go that route. It's something that is physically different in your brain, at least different enough that you can spot it with a scan.

I am a person with empathy.

I am an empathetic person.

There's no point in arguing about these interpretations. Some people get convinced that "X with Y" means that X has Y, and since this is used in sentences like "X has cancer," autism is portrayed as a disease. There are other people who oppose the adjectival phrase for similar reasons.

IMO, the point in these cases is more that a certain phrase has obtained a negative connotation, and should be avoided, but it is framed in some Sapir-Whorf-like style.

Euphemism treadmill, etc.

This is my take too. Ultimately the precise language used is immaterial. It is the intent behind it that matters. The precise language used may be indicative of intent, but that should be judged on a case-by-case basis rather than assuming "phrasing X good, phrasing Y bad", which will lead to both false positives and false negatives.

But are you an entity with Person or a Person with Entity?

If one cannot analyze words to w/i an inch of death, what is one to do on the internet other than speak in the 3rd person?

While I can see where you’re coming from, I don’t believe those around me or the community I live in see it as such a dire designation and of a disease. It’s a common term of phrase that doesn’t really need to be picked apart.

Your community may not be the problem. There are other communities (such as Autism Speaks) which do view it as a disease. And the popularity of this viewpoint is evident by the number of jigsaw puzzle piece bumper stickers around.

Most people with autism don't care at all.

I've been told to use both "autistic person" and "person with autism", and that the alternate phrase is bad. For any individual I'll use whichever they prefer, but there is no consensus of this whatsoever.

The "with autism" stuff seems to be pushed by relatives of autistic people. I doubt most autistic people would care.

The journalists and corporate communication people seem to be in disagreement with this. There has been a big push to change everything to be "person of" or "person with". "Person with vision impairment" rather than "blind person". To emphasize that they are regular people first.

Those have very different meanings to me. "vision impairment" suggests at least some degree of vision, while "blind" is basically "can't see at all."

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