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11:57am July 6, 2012

Tagged NSFW just to be on the safe side: The clusterfuck icon is a tiny but explicit drawing of a tangled orgy.

[Screenshot of a communication page in the Proloquo2Go software, titled Cussing. Each square has different words, each with an icon representing it. Some squares are folders that go to other pages full of words. Across the top is the area where the entire message is printed. The message across the top is “You are shitting me.”

The squares are: Pronouns (folder). Stop. Are. A. An. Off. Crap. Crappy. Shit. Shitty. Bullshit. Dipshit. Ass. Asshole. Asshat. Fuck. Clusterfuck. Piss. Hell. Damn. Douchebag. Douche nozzle. Bollocks. Bastard.]

[A second screenshot shows the same message at the top, only it says “You are”. Everything is dark except squares showing the following words: Shit. Shit. Shits. Shat. Will shit. Shitting. Shat.]

I had to do this. Since so many communication aids for disabled people seem designed to make us sound like children, and particularly angelic children at that. Because it is so easy for parents and teachers and staff to just prevent us swearing altogether, rather than allowing us a choice in the matter.

It’s one of those icky areas where they don’t want you doing something so, since for once it’s in their power, why not make it impossible? And they never even consider how that limits us, because it’s a bad thing to do, in their eyes, so why does it need to be possible? Even though they’d surely object to someone reaching out and shutting their throat any time they said anything ‘bad’.

I’m also ridiculously pleased that the software actually rendered shit’s past tense as shat. You can’t program the contents of those little windows you get from pressing and holding a button — they just respond to the part of speech it is (which also affects the color of the button’s border). It’s that feature which allows me to use “are” without adding every other form of the word.

The words across the top are just ones that seemed to make it easier to create sentences. Like off becomes fuck off, piss off, it’s pissing me off, etc. And stop for stop being an asshole. I might rearrange later but those few words seem to create a huge range of possibilities. I got as many icons as possible from within the software, but they are horribly limited with regard to explicit body parts. (Which is horrible because it restricts people’s ability to talk or ask questions about their body, including but not limited to medical stuff, sexuality, and abuse. The PCS symbol system has very explicit icons, but this software isn’t using PCS and I didn’t want to scan my communication books just to make this page.) So I had to go to the web for a lot of it.