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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> It is an inevitable and, more to the point, healthy process, necessary in view of the eternal gulf between language and opinion.

I don't know if this is a "healthy" process. Inevitable it may well be. But it doesn't change attitudes, it doesn't help the people involved and one issue I don't see talked about is that the quality of the language itself seems to drop through this process. "Crippled" has a certain pithiness and is a distinct word. "Differently abled" has many more syllables and verbal overlap with words like "different" and "able". We're shrinking the ability to describe things in a process that might literally be Orwellian.

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Not every attempt is a good attempt. I'm disabled, not differently abled. But I'm also not crippled nor retarded.

If, a decade from now, someone comes up with a better term I might be whatever that is.

But I still am glad we've moved on past early 20th century labels and are trying new ones on. Some might not fit nicely, but they are progress generally.

I think the author misstepped by using "different abled" as their leading example - I don't think it really has any support in the disabled community.

This article is from a while ago. I do recall differently abled being proposed at some point though it has not caught on.

It's commonly used by parents towards their children. It's considered quite infantilizing among many disabled communities.

> It's considered quite infantilizing among many disabled communities.

I wonder how common this is with any minority. The majority gets to decide what to call you. Guessing they didn't ask first to see what you think, either. I would be wildly irritated to be in that position.

Yep. Super common.

But also, pushing back against it sometimes get labeled as woke. Eskimo and Gypsy are both terms that were applied to groups without their choice. And some people are now preferring other terms that they do choose. (Eg Inuit or Roma)

But why are you glad that we moved on? Almost none of the old words were offensive in themselves. "Retarded" or "crippled" may sound offensive now, but that is completely unrelated to the etymology or meaning, it is _solely_ because it refers to something people don't want to be, so people started to use them as slurs.

It just seems so futile to have to keep coming up with new words for the same thing, when the new words will inevitably become slurs in the same way, at least if anyone uses them. So it's not like we can avoid the offence, it is just transferred to a new word. Wouldn't it be better to accept that some people will say mean things, and focus on learning to live with that, and on making people be less mean?

Good question. Sometimes these terms come from a medical background and people do not like to be medicalized. Sometimes the terms are too narrow, eg not all disabilities are crippling. Sometimes these terms are exonyms and people do not like them. Sometimes the words change meaning over time.

And sometimes we return to them. Queer is a label I use for myself that's a reclaimed slur. I know plenty of gay men who call themselves fags. Some disabled people use "crip" as a term of endearment. But usually these reclaimed slurs are for the exclusive use of the members of the community internally.

There's also the loss of some connotations and nuance when the next euphemism comes in. The loss of the connotations is often the whole reason for the euphemism, but ideally you'd keep both words to allow describing the thing with/without the connotation.

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