We already do this with some slurs, right? We can start enforcing these words, too.
Not calling anyone out, I’ve been guilty of it too. And we don’t have to do it all at once. Like, we can start with these:
Ableist words and alternatives.
Stupid, R€tarded, Idiot(ic), Cretin, or Moron(ic): People say this to imply something, or someone isn’t intelligent or worth their time, but the words refer to people with intellectual disabilities. Instead, say that a situation or person is frustrating, ignorant, dense, unpleasant, cheesy, or awful.
Dumb: This word refers to a person who doesn’t speak verbally, but people often use it to mean that something or someone isn’t intelligent or wise. It’s listed separately from stupid and its synonyms because it references a physical disability instead of an intellectual one. Try using any of the non-ableist synonyms like irritating or uncool.
Crazy, Nuts, Mad, Psycho, or Insane: “Wow, that’s crazy!” may not seem like a harmful statement, but if you think about someone with a mental health condition hearing that statement, it’s easy to realize that it is. So instead of using one of those words, try outrageous, bananas, bizarre, amazing, intense, extreme, overwhelming, or wild.
I am a 100 gecs fan so I reserve the right to use certain ableist language in reclaiming ways, as it applies to me.
The “r-word” is already banned, as it’s basically the only one of those that hasn’t completely lost any connection to their original meaning.
So no imo.
Bananas: Cool and good
Nuts: cringe
Chiquita shills out in full force smh. First Guatemala, now hexbear???
Try using any of the non-ableist synonyms like irritating or uncool.
Can you suggest a word that actually replaces the meaning people are using it for?
The issue most of the time here is that idiot or stupid or dumb are used in context to functionally mean “a person making a [decision/action/statement] that lacked proper thought” and while I agree that in various contexts these words are ableist, and that they carry ableist sentiments because of their usage in those contexts I have failed to find useful synonyms that replace the functionality of these words when their intent is still just “that was a decision/action/whatever made by someone not giving appropriate thought to the situation”. Wew that’s a badly written run on sentence.
To properly address this problem in language an appropriate substitute must be given to people, or one must be created. The issue I see with creating words to fill this niche however is that they will last just months before beginning use by reactionaries in an ableist context where they will quickly then become tainted.
I think there are good alternatives depending on the situations like frustrating, unwise, thoughtless, even evil when it’s capitalism doing something very egregious.
There are alternatives out there. We don’t use them because these ableist words act as a convenient filler, but if there common usage causes some people to feel discomfort, then imo we should look into removing these from our vocabulary.
Convenient filler how though? Because they are short and convey the intent of the user in the shortest way possible.
This is the problem. When I make a mistake and say “I’m dumb” like leaving my phone in the fridge because I was half asleep this morning, I’m not being ableist to myself am I? “I’m half asleep and have sleep walked into a silly action” is the intent. The problem is that the words are ALSO used by ableists in an ableist way, to actually harm the recipients.
We clearly need very short words to communicate these hiccups and mistakes we do. What we need if we’re going to make ground on this front (outside of niche hyper-aware communities) is short words that aren’t also capable of being used by reactionaries to harm people of varying ability, thus tainting them.
I’ve seen someone say that my above example could just be “Doh” and I’ve seen others turn around and ask the question of whether Homer Simpson is an ableist caricature that makes that word ableist. The topic is… Very difficult.
I’m not even saying that we shouldn’t approach this with the aim of fixing it in society. What I’m saying is that we should approach it with tactics that will actually work, and right now I don’t think we’ve figured out how to replace this little communication niche properly. I think we can, and that we should approach doing this when we’ve actually worked out how to replace it linguistically. Without proper replacements people engage in a lot of pushback and even in leftist groups I’ve seen it cause pretty bad splits. I think especially in a dirtbag left setting there’s going to be splitting over it.
Great post comrade.
To give some theoretical oomph, the chain of metonymy is the problem here -any replacement for your example will also be inextricably related to the term it’s replacing. So “doh” is a great example since it’s in theory harmless, but its associations (with both the word replaced and the caricature) mean that we can’t ever imagine a “pure” word completely divorced from its problematic versions.
However, I think that there’s a degree between calling something “dumb” (perhaps the least offensive of all of these? It hasn’t been in the ableist usage for a long time…) and then more problematic ones like specific conditions (for conditions in the DSM now) or other more “charged” terms.
Should we still recognize the history? Yes. But as Fred Jameson says, history is what hurts, and we can never get out of it. I don’t think it’s worth fighting over some of these more benign ones that history has sanded down, at least not when there’s more appealing targets.
I agree only with banning “derp”
