(en)abled

For years now, I have been strongly averse to the word "disabled." The word "disabled" is inherently, well, disabling. On the shallowest grounds, I would define “disability” as a tolerated and/or condoned consequence of some sort of mental, physical, or emotional impairment/challenge. The say, "sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me," is in my eyes one of the most unsound sayings I have ever heard. For sticks and stones do break bones, but bones grow back together. Words, rather than "never hurt me," will forever hurt me. Words can hurt.  They can break things that are much more essential than bones – they can break spirits and hearts. Words do matter.  And using them precisely matters even more.

Growing up, the words “disabled,” “inept,” “handicapped,” “special,” “retarded,” “different,” “challenged,” “feeble-minded” were commonly regarded as "politically correct" as to when referring to persons with mental, physical, or emotional challenges. At that point in time, society thought of and accepted these words as being accurate ones when described a person’s condition.  However, today, we know that they are not.  The mere allotment of such a word immediately stigmatized a person as being “different,” in some fundamental way or another. The problem here is that all of the above names succeed at categorizing people, but where are these separate categories? There aren't. There are no categories to further classify these "different" folk. If you have a bad case of Dyslexia, according to the majority of our society's vocabulary, you might as well be a quadriplegic.  The words we deem to be acceptable need, and must, refrain from diminishing these not-so-different people to a separate, lower class. 

Sometimes it seems as if our society has only recently jumped on the bandwagon of better ourselves and the world we live in. People are so quick and eager to orchestrate some sort of fundraiser to go towards funding or to help those in need, but if society wants to make a change, we need to begin with our language. Language is key to accurate descriptions, and accurate descriptions are the fundamental bases for changing preconceived notions.