The term "impairment" was an outdated label and should not be used to define the disabilities of others, a Fine Gael TD told the Oireachtas Committee on Education last Monday. David Staunton said he was disappointed that the Minister, Mr Dempsey, had used the term "impairment model" when discussing the Education for Persons with Disabilities Bill. Moreover, the very term "educational disability" was inappropriate, because people with physical disabilities took umbrage at it.
Smell the breeze. Familiar, isn't it? The year is now 2004, and sickly, creepy-crawly, tip-toeing sanctimony is again on the prowl, yearning to be appalled, like a Victorian maiden on her hands and knees in the drawing room, carefully examining the furniture for any sign of an offending leg. Yet even David Staunton found it was impossible not to blow his foot off in the linguistic minefield laid by the grim sappers of political correctness, when he essentially told the Minister that he shouldn't say "disabilities" because people with disabilities didn't like the word "disabilities".
How do you anathematise a word without using it, therefore violating your anathema? You can't. Moreover, we've been in a two-decade-long linguistic soft-shoe shuffle trying to find the right words to describe people who used to be called cripples. Then they became the handicapped. Then they became the disabled, whose handicap was caused by society. Then they became people with disabilities. Now, according to the Fine Gael lexicon, even that term is wrong.
Perhaps paralysed by the porridge of verbal piety in which he found himself, the Minister declared he wanted to make the broadest possible definition in this Bill for people with disabilities. Therefore he intended the Bill to cover "anyone who had needs". He even went so far as to define educational disability as "any impairment of the capacity to learn". Well, I know that one all right: it's a right bastard, hitting home every time I tried to master the subjunctive modes of irregular Latin verbs.
So! Help! I'm Disabled Too! In other words, what the committee and the Minister have actually managed to do is to redefine disability so loosely and inoffensively that everyone's disabled, and therefore no-one is; and in this brave new world of universal disability, either all shall have wheelchairs, white sticks, stair-lifts and people-with-needs allowances, or none shall.
Disabilities come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing which unites them is that they actually disable or handicap their victims. Contrary to what the Disabled Militants have been insisting, society doesn't do that; the disabilities do. Blind people don't go in goal, legless people don't join the Rangers, deaf people don't conduct symphonies, and you can't blame society for that. That's the unfairness of disabilities. They disable, they handicap and, most of all, by hitting some and not others, they discriminate.
This doesn't mean that as a society we shouldn't do our best to help the disabled, and wherever possible compensate for their disabilities. But the one certain way of not doing that is to reach for a vocabulary of bland and anodyne words without meaning, such as those favoured by the TDs in the Dáil.
To be sure, dealing with mental handicap has long been a linguistically fraught exercise. The Romans thought Christians were idiots, hence the word cretins, which used to be a highly taboo word, but is no longer. Imbecile - which means "without a stick", i.e., handicapped but unaided - was similarly frowned on. Both now have entered the more general lexicon as metaphors, rather than as clinical descriptions, though my computer - no doubt with software intended for the more sensitive US market - declines to recognise either word.
Attempts to create new value-free terms for the handicapped have always foundered on the hard rocks of childish intolerance. "Remedial" was the euphemism introduced to abolish the term "backward" in the classroom; in no time at all, a child who wanted to insult another's intelligence would say he or she was "remedial".
"Learning difficulties" took the place of remedial: that too is now a childish rebuke. The condition of spastic paralysis became verbally reduced to spastic (in essence the same word as spasm) which children cruelly used as an insult: thus the term "spa" for a dolt, an idiot, a dunderhead, lives on.
If we try to launder our language so that it cannot be an imagined insult for the groups involved, or for fear of corruption in the school playground, then we stay silent, our tongues clamped with a scold's bridle. We can try telling the disabled that they have special needs, but we all have those. So why it so difficult to say that there is a group apart who are disabled? For it is quite obvious that there is. Most of us aren't in that group today, but we - me, you - could be in it tomorrow.
We do nothing whatever for disabled people by whimpering in the Dáil that they don't like the words "disabled" or "impairment". The impairment caused the disability; nothing else did. Eliminating either word, and calling the proposed legislation, say, the Bill for People With Uncommon or Difficult Needs will change nothing, any more than removing the word "death" from the English language will add a second to the life of a single person.
People with disabilities have feelings too. The last thing we should do is patronise them with sanctimonious linguistic engineering, and for many reasons - the most compelling, you cretin, being that it simply doesn't work.