Disability Basics

"Disabled. The car stalled in the left lane of traffic is disabled. Or alternatively, the broad stairs curving into a public building disable the man in a wheelchair. That word used as a noun (the disabled or people with disabilities), an adjective (disabled people) , a verb (the accident disabled her): in all its forms it means "unable," but where does our inability lie? Are our bodies like stalled cars? Or does disability live in the social and physical environment, in the stairs that have no accompanying ramp?  I think about language. I often call nondisabled people able-bodied, or when I'm feeling confrontational, temporarily able-bodied. But if I call myself disabled in order to describe how the ableist world treats me as a person with cerebral palsy, then shouldn't I call nondisabled people enabled? That word locates the condition of being non disabled, not in the non-disabled body, but in the world's reaction to that body. This is not a semantic game. Cripple. The woman who walks with a limp, the kid who uses braces, the man with gnarly hands hear the word cripple every day in a hostile nondisabled world. At the same time, we in the disability rights movement create crip culture, tell crip jokes, identify a sensibility we call crip humor. Nancy Mairs writes: 'I am a cripple. I choose this word to name me .... People —crippled or not — wince at the word cripple, as they do not at handicapped or disabled. Perhaps I want them to wince. I want them to see me as a tough customer, one to whom the fates/gods/viruses have not been kind, but who can face the brutal truth of her existence squarely. As a cripple, I swagger.' Differently abled, physically challenged. Nondisabled people, wanting to cushion us from the cruelty of language, invented these euphemisms. In explaining her choice of the word cripple, Nancy Mairs writes: Differently abled ... partakes of the same semantic hopefulness that transformed countries from undeveloped to underdeveloped, then to less developed, and finally developing nations. People have continued to starve in those countries during the shift. Some realities do not obey the dictates of language.' Differently abled is simply easier to say, easier to think about than disabled or handicapped or crippled. ...In the world as it should be, maybe disabled people would be differently abled: a world where Braille and audio-recorded editions of books and magazines were a matter of course, and hearing people signed ASL; a world where schools were fully integrated, health care, free and unrationed; a world where universal access meant exactly that; a world where disabled people were not locked up at home or in nursing homes, relegated to sheltered employment and paid sweatshop wages. But, in the world as it is, differently abled, physically challenged tell a wishful lie."​