What do you think about the recent "People with blindness" obsession, as evidenced in the title?
I am not blind nor deaf etc., but I am frankly fed up with it. In my case, should I call myself "a person with programming, Czechness and fortysomething years"?
Nope, I am a middle-aged Czech programmer. Yes, that does not reflect my entire personality and humanity. So what. Better than this sort of language abuse.
I’d argue that a plain-English reading is actually the other way around. A “person with a car” is a normal descriptor, a “car person” is somebody for whom cars are a major life fixture. So accordingly I feel that “blind person” makes it more… conclusive? all encompassing? than “person with blindness”.
"blind" isn't a noun though. "a noun person" is what you mentioned, but "an adjective person" is different. A tall person isn't all about their height, they're just way above average in height. "A person with tallness" would emphasize the height aspect in a strange way.
In TFA it could be as simple as trying to differentiate between fully "blind" people vs people with MACD (or other severe visual impairments as indicated at the end)
i.e, people with a condition that leads to blindness, full or partial.
A car person would be some kind of car person hybrid if you read it literally. Car person is acting as a short hand for "Car obsessed person." Car is a noun, blind is an adjective, etc...
> What do you think about the recent "People with blindness" obsession, as evidenced in the title?
Is there really an "obsession"? Also, while I don't deny there's some discussion here, I think you really have to squint to read the title in such a way.
In any case, I ... really don't care. As another commenter says, there are other, bigger, more important hills to die on than getting worked up about people trying to be more inclusive with their language.
Does it take anything away from me or minimize my disability when I'm referred to as a "blind person" vs a "person with blindness"? Not at all. So why does it matter?
And to be honest, I've never once met a blind person (or autistic person) who actually cares about this type of wording. I think this is one of those battles being fought by the extremes on either side, and it's frustrating and exhausting for everyone else, because it's a distraction from the real issues. And you can see this right in this comment!
> I am not blind nor deaf etc., but I am frankly fed up with it.
You're "frankly fed up" with something that barely affects you at all. Why?
Not sure that specific phrase is an obsession, but I hear a lot of language-police-type people who try to shame others into changing some phrases like this. The one I hear most often where I live is to use "person experiencing homelessness" rather than "homeless person", the idea being to not to consider "homeless" as a part of their identity, but to acknowledge that it's a (hopefully) temporary situation they have found themselves in.
I get what people are trying to do here, but I think it's unnecessary, and just increases people's cognitive load and adds verbosity to expression. And gives disingenuous people more ammunition to derail discussions. And as you say, it seems like most of the people pushing for things like this haven't even talked to a blind/disabled/homeless person to ask what language offends them. I don't know any blind people, but the people I've talked to with various disabilities had no issues with being called "disabled".
> You're "frankly fed up" with something that barely affects you at all. Why?
Not the person you're replying to, but I assume the problem is that other people often shame or "correct" them when they use the "wrong" terminology, which is not only annoying, but can even cause real-world problems (e.g.: use the "wrong" term at work and maybe your career prospects get worse).
First, this is often forced on people from the above. I don't like the idea of language coercion, doubly so for ideological reasons. Imagine that BBC journalists were forced to include Allah or some nationalist tropes in their work in order to increase piousness and patriotism of their readers; to some people, this actually sounds like a good idea! I don't believe you would wave it away easily.
Orwell described this well with his "Ministry of Truth". BBC (from which this article comes) isn't a ministry, but isn't a private subject either.
Second, can you think about the long term consequences? Just look around at the sorry state of Western politics and Western online discourse.
Language is one of the few cultural commons that remains. There is no chance that stuff like "people with blindness" or "LatinX" will universally prevail. Too many people react to it negatively, including in the young generation. We run a real risk of the left and the right developing mutually incomprehensible languages, which would be a disaster - once that happens, the polarization will be cemented in, because swing voters would have to be bilingual.
I've seen the split of Czechoslovakia myself, and Czech and Slovak aren't even mutually incomprehensible. Just far enough to remind the people that they are very different from each other.
Third, this construct is extremely impractical. One of the actual observations of Chomsky is that natural languages are good at chaining things. For example, you can easily talk about poor blind homeless black people. Once you enter this rabbit hole fully, you have people of color with blindness experiencing poverty and unhousedness. This is just not a reasonable way to communicate and this is also my main hope that this abomination dies out. (It reminds me of Old Norse kennings [0], but those were an art form and never considered to be an actual language of communication.)
Again, see Orwell and his newspeak (Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc.) Orwell wrote his dystopias based on experience with the English intellectual far left, and it seems that those ideas live on.
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Summed together, to start all this while the actual blind people DGAF, as you yourself say, is at best an experiment in futility and at worst throwing more ** into the fan that has us already deeply covered in **.
To tag onto this, how do you feel about using "blind" in the figurative sense? Like "People born with various kinds of privilege are often blind to the ways they subtly benefit from that privilege on a daily basis"
Well, it's not always nice to realize that your condition is casually used as a negative conotation in everyday language. OTOH, there are worse things in life, so I mostly blink and move on... There are other hills to die on.
Not sure I understand your point, but if it’s helpful, I’m blind, prefer to be called blind, but get tired of educating people on what “blind” actually means as it’s a spectrum and not a binary condition.
In my community we refer to non-blind people as “sighted” which I suppose is also a spectrum.
Blind is very descriptive, and in my opinion not derogatory. I’d rather it not be my primary differentiator or descriptor unless comparing me to virtually identical people who have full or near full vision. “The blind engineer on the team” is ok with me as it’s the fastest way to describe me if we’re all middle aged guys with beards. If I’m the only bearded guy on the team of middle aged engineers I’d prefer “the engineer with a beard”
Since you ask... I am find as long as blind is actually used. I dont particular care about the order of words. However, what I absolutely despise and truely hate is this "visually challenged" nonesense from the leftist language police.
Isn’t “visually challenged” (or similar) a useful term for people who have visual impairments, but aren’t technically blind?
Do you have the same objection to, say, “visually impaired” if a person is trying to talk about all people with various vision problems, up to being fully blind?
If those are unacceptable, what would you use in that case?
It's an attempt to whitewash the issues, and not use words which imply real problems. I prefer visually impared, however, in the US, legally blind basically says the same thing.
My gf (blind herself) recently met a teacher on a train, who told her she is working with her class to find a new word to replace "disabled". IMO, just so that she doesn't have to deal with reality. And, mind you, no disabled person around... It is just sad what some people are doing on "behalf of us", just so they don't have to grapple with the fact that some people have a harsh life.
It is hard to explain the sadness, as I also have a language barrier, english being my second language. However, believe me, I virtually know no disabled person who likes these language games. If we are amongst each other, we all agree this patronising is sad and should stop.
> It is just sad what some people are doing on "behalf of us"
I find this very frustrating. Most of the time it seems that people who do this sort of thing haven't even talked to a disabled person and asked what language offends them or makes them feel bad.
> just so they don't have to grapple with the fact that some people have a harsh life.
The cynical part of me thinks that often it's not even this; it's just virtue signaling.
Nah, its only perceived as a slur by language police people with little stakes in the actual game. And, the slur thing is definitely not an US only phenomenon. In the german speaking area where I dwell, the youth use "spast" as a general derogatory term for everyone they dont like or perceive as "below" them. That is definitely a slur that went rogue.
I actually thought you were just saying you were tired of reading about blind people and software made for them everywhere (perhaps as if to say there weren't actually that many blind people and you were feeling they were overrepresented). The exact wording didn't even hit me until I read the child comments to yours.
The homeless/houseless stuff usually sticks out to me, but I guess "people with blindness" didn't sound that weird. It also sounds less strict, like saying you're blind makes me think so sight at all, "legally blind" as I sometimes hear would make me think hardly any sight. Being "with blindness" to me could mean something more partial, more of a spectrum. It also sounds more like we might say someone has IBS or diabetes, not that they are those things.
Perhaps blind/deaf/dumb and the like are archaic terms because even with very primitive medical technology you could diagnose these things, so we've got much older records about them. I am not bothered by any of these terms, but I'm also not blind, nor a person with blindness, heh.
It's a remnant of the woke era, and I expect and hope it will go the way of Latinx.
The (foolish) idea was that the word "blind" has a negative charge, so if we replace it with another word the stigma will go away, and blind people can feel better.
But of course, any stigma comes from the blindness itself. Any replacement term will get the same stigma, and will then need to be replaced.
The idea of replacing "blind people" with "people with blindness" has absolutely nothing to do with the idea that "blind" is negative - if it did, I suspect proponents would, you know, not use the word blind!
The actual reasoning is putting the people first, not their disability.
It shortcuts the American tendency to turn all disability-related nouns into slurs. (I found out a few weeks ago that "deaf-mute" is a slur in the States.) That's the major advantage, as far as I can tell.
Wikipedia says it is, citing the National Association of the Deaf's Community and Culture FAQ (among others). If you have sources that say otherwise, that suggests a NPOV issue with the "Deaf-mute" Wikipedia article.
There’s a few nut-jobs in the deaf community that cause a lot of trouble. The same people that are against “curing deafness” because to them deafness isn’t disability to be cured and any work towards that is an insult to them.
Not worth listening (ha!) to them and things like Wikipedia are just an outcome of their pressure campaigns.
Neither have I – but Wikipedia also cites the OED (paywalled, so I can't confirm this). If the OED really says that deaf-mute is used as a slur, then I believe it. Again, if you have positive evidence that deaf-mute is not used as a slur, then please correct the Wikipedia article.
Helen Keller was deaf-blind but not mute: she gave many of the speeches she wrote, although she never got her speech as clear as she would've liked. (See e.g. https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=8ch_H8pt9M8&t=124) Despite what the National Association of the Deaf's Community and Culture FAQ claims, deaf people can learn to speak: it's just a lot harder, since they have to approach it as an applied articulatory phonetics exercise. (Helen Keller used the Tadoma method to get information that a sighted deaf person might get visually: https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=GzlriQv16gg)
If you're neither a bigot nor a member of a minority group, you're unlikely to be familiar with the slurs used against members of that group. And, of course, different cultures have different slurs. The fact we've never observed these words being used as slurs doesn't mean they aren't predominately used that way, in certain cultures.
> Some consider it to be a derogatory term if used outside its historical context; the preferred term today is simply deaf.[2]
which refers to
Moore, Matthew S. & Levitan, Linda (2003). For Hearing People Only, Answers to Some of the Most Commonly Asked Questions About the Deaf Community, its Culture, and the "Deaf Reality", Rochester, New York: Deaf Life Press
and I am not reading that or considering it authoritative.
From 2nd ed OED you have,
deaf-mute, a., n.
[After F. sourd-muet.]
a. Deaf and dumb. b. One who is deaf and dumb.
1837 Penny Cycl. VIII. 322/2 s.v. Deaf and Dumb, In all these conditions of deafness, the person is consequently mute, or dumb. Hence the expression Deaf-Mute, as used in the continental languages, and Deaf and Dumb, as used in England and America. 1865 New Syd. Soc. Year-Bk. for 1864. 479 A deaf-mute child. 1881 H. James Portr. Lady xxv, He might as well address her in the deaf-mute's alphabet.
Hence ˈdeaf-ˈmuteness, ˈdeaf-ˈmutism, the condition of a deaf-mute.
1874 H. R. Reynolds John Bapt, ii. 109 The deaf-muteness of Zacharias. 1865 New Syd. Soc. Year-Bk. for 1864. 318 Congenital deaf-mutism. 1874 Roosa Dis. Ear 515 Deaf-muteism is caused by diseases of the middle and internal ears. 1884 A. J. Ellis in Athenæum 12 Jan. 55/2 This art [of lip-reading], the keystone of the modern bridge from deaf-mutism to deaf sociality.
which doesn’t indicate derogatory.
Plus I have never heard it used in a derogatory manner. Also from an argument or debate perspective, when stating something improbable, you should not be asking people to prove improbable things wrong and instead should be showing the proof of improbable things yourself
> In informal American English the term dumb is sometimes used to refer to other hearing people in jest, to chide, or to invoke an image of someone who refuses to employ common sense or who is unreliable.[9] In the past deaf-mute was used to describe deaf people who used sign language, but in modern times, the term is frequently viewed today as offensive and inaccurate.[10]
I have shown all of the evidence available to me. “I am not reading that or considering it authoritative.” is not a counterargument.
> From 2nd ed OED you have,
The 2nd edition of the OED is not paywalled. (It also has several methodological issues: https://oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk/oed-editions/oed2/) The Wikipedia article references the paywalled online edition, which is probably the 3rd edition entry. All of this information was available to you. Please do not accuse me of "just making things up" without at least checking.
I am not blind nor deaf etc., but I am frankly fed up with it. In my case, should I call myself "a person with programming, Czechness and fortysomething years"?
Nope, I am a middle-aged Czech programmer. Yes, that does not reflect my entire personality and humanity. So what. Better than this sort of language abuse.