1:45am September 4, 2012

➸ "You don't need this junk. You need a cat.": About words and people with language impairments.

squidids:

youneedacat:

I know this is a wider trend, but when I see it happening in the autistic community it makes me go WTF.

So there’s a lot of people who go one step beyond analyzing the language we use. Analyzing the language we use is fine. I have no problem with it. Sometimes it’s important.

But then.

People…

In almost any activist community, you’ll see an action that starts out as a way to avoid hurting people, but morphs into a way of signaling how committed you are to your group. You’re judged not on whether you actually hurt people but on how closely you conform to a particular set of rules.

And, like any social signal, these are designed to be costly in some way. They take effort. Or money, or intelligence, or mental flexibility. Which means that there are always going to be people who can’t afford the signal.

And if thse groups were able to see their “costly signal” requirements for what they were, theyd be able to make accommodations for people who couldnt afford them. But they cant because the difference between “were doing this to avoid hurting people” and “were doing this to show off how committed we are to not hurting people” is deliberately, if not consciously, obscured, so that people can pretend that the signal is not just a signal but an actual measure of how good you are as a person.

Yes. All of that. Happens all the time.

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