Spaz Movement Today S Post About The Common Theme Facebook

Many slurs are a hard “no” to say— we know how they’ve been used to undermine minority groups and understand why we shouldn’t use them. Disability slurs, however, don’t receive the same negative press as words that harm other minority groups, so they’re often regularly interspersed in our conversations. If you’d like to change your phrasing to be more mindful of the disability community’s history and challenges, here are 10 common terms you may not know are disability slurs. If you’ve ever called someone a “spaz,” you may have meant it all in good fun, but it’s anything but fun for many people with disabilities. The word “spaz” is slang for “spastic,” which is a medical term that was originally used to describe people with cerebral palsy. By the 1960s, though, “spastic” had devolved into the word “spaz” — and quickly became synonymous with thoughtless, out-of-control, ridiculous behavior.

Plenty of people with disabilities have been called “spaz” for simply existing in their bodies or speaking or thinking in ways able-bodied, neurotypical people don’t understand. 60 years later, we still haven’t retired the word “spaz” from our everyday conversations, but it’s time to leave it a thing of the past. You’ve probably used the word “crazy” more times than you can count, but you may not know it’s harmful to people with mental illness. Since the Middle Ages, “crazy” has derogatorily referred to people who have a disease or sickness. In the 1920s, the word “crazy” started becoming synonymous with the word “cool,” and to this day, it’s often used to describe fun, exciting experiences. Unfortunately, though, it’s also been weaponized against plenty of people with mental illness to describe their symptoms.

Although we’ve made progress in dismantling the mental health stigma, people with mental illness still are called “crazy” for having noticeable symptoms of schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, and anxiety. Any offensive word that was a staple in the Dark Ages is not a word we still need in our lives. If your first inclination is to call a boring night out or a letdown of a party “lame,” please think again. Although “lame” was originally a term to describe people who struggle to move, by the 1600s, it was used to describe old, irrelevant news. In the 1940s, “lame” became even more derogatory as it rose in popularity as a way to describe socially awkward people. Although “lame” is still regularly thrown around as an innocent enough teen insult, its connotations make it detrimental to people with disabilities who have difficulty walking or who struggle with social interactions.

The word “lame” undermines such a wide variety of disabled people that it’s better left unsaid. You’ve likely seen the “r-word” all over the internet — and you may also have spotted plenty of campaigns against it. “Retard” is one of the most recognizable disability slurs, but even a spate of awareness campaigns about how the “r-word” hurts people with intellectual disabilities hasn’t taken it out of people’s vocabularies. The word arose in the Middle Ages to neutrally describe a slow state or a delay, but in the 1970s, its meaning shifted to offensively describe people with cognitive delays. People with all kinds of disabilities — from Down syndrome to cerebral palsy to autism — have heard the “r-word” directed towards them, so even if you use it to describe able-bodied people or...

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