Why YSK: because what seems like equal situation from surface isn’t always equal opportunity for all. And even when equal measure of help is provided, it might not be equally useful.

  • @Ricaz
    5•11 months ago

    Just a language thing, sorry. In my country this word does not have any negative connotation.

    • DessertStorms
      -1•11 months ago

      I think it’s much more likely that it does have negative connotations (especially since the etymology of the word itself is negative, there is no way around that. Never mind the stigma it carries), but no one has pointed it out to you until this point.

      But now you know, and since language matters, please just say the word and in future call us what we are - disabled people.

      • @Ricaz
        2•11 months ago

        I genuinely have multiple friends who use that word about themselves. It isn’t negative unless people perceive so.

        • DessertStorms
          1•11 months ago

          First of all, thanks for proving you’ve not bothered reading any of the information I linked, because it clearly states otherwise:

          So King Henry VII passed some landmark legislation. He proclaimed that begging in the streets be legal for people with disabilities. So into the streets, with their “cap in hand”, went King Henry’s disabled veterans, to beg for money”. So with cap in hand referred to beggars, or people of no value in society.
          The term is also used in horseracing and wagering. It measures the superiority of one contestant over another. This is the belief that one participant is stronger or better than another. The word “handicap” is rating one thing better or worse than another.
          It appears that “handicapped” seems to have begun to describe a wide range of disadvantages, including social, economic and even moral standards. The website by Arika Okrent (2015) reports: “Handicap began to be applied to physical and mental differences in the early 1900s, when the new fields of sociology and social work started looking at people in terms of their place in society as a whole”. The term was used to describe people viewed as physically or mentally flawed.

          Second of all, disabled people reclaiming a word for themselves, no matter how friendly you are with them, still doesn’t give you the right to use it to describe the rest of us (or at all except for if your friends specifically asked you to, and I’d honestly consider whether they actually want to be called that, or that they know that you would react as badly as you are here, so don’t bother to correct you because they have better things to spend their energy on than educating a “friend” who would use them as debate tools to prove how not ableist you are. Hint: doing that is ableist), just like you don’t go around using the N word or the F and T slurs, all of which have been reclaimed by their own community but are still derogatory when used by outsiders.

          So like I told that other person:
          you can choose to be respectful and make the tiniest adjustment to your vocabulary, or you can choose to continue to use a harmful term despite now knowing full well that it is harmful, proving to me and others just how little of a shit you give about disabled people.

          I’ve done my part, the choice is yours, and you’re clearly choosing to prioritise your own ego over respecting disabled people on the most basic level.

          Which I guess only leaves me feeling sorry for your “friends” (or should I say tokens?)

          • @Ricaz
            0•11 months ago

            My point is that words are part of languages which change very fluidly, and you could make the same argument for hundreds of other words.

            If the word isn’t considered bad by anyone hearing it or anyone it describes, nothing is wrong with it. Many meanings are different between your language and mine, even though they sound alike or share some etymology.