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Lunch with Vinnie today, where she outlined how the BBC’s disability site, Ouch, conducted a survey to see how offended disabled and non-disabled people felt about a range of words used to describe people with a disability.

The usual range of spastic, cripple, mong and window-licker came up from both camps, but the one thing it proved more than anything else was how hyper-sensitive the non-disabled respondents were compared to those who described themselves as having a disability. While the latter group found spastic the most offensive term on offer, only 15.1% objected, as opposed to the 21.5% of non-disabled who objected to retard, the 19.6% who were offended by window licker, the 19.2% who complained about spastic, and the 15.7% who thought mong was the most offensive term you could use.

In comparison, only 5.8% of disabled respondents complained about mong, and 5.3% about window-licker.

However, while only 0.9% of able-bodied participants thought wheelchair-bound was offensive, a far greater number of disabled people - 6.3% - thought it was an offensive term, perhaps because it defines a person in reference to an external factor rather than a physical trait.

Unfortunately the poll didn’t reveal the term that disabled respondents would prefer to hear in more common use, but it is certainly worth remembering that both wheelchair-bound and handicapped (and the horrific ’special’) are far more offensive to disabled people than they are to the disabled bodied speakers who may be using those terms.

The full comparison can be found here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006 at 5:55 pm and is filed under Language, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.