7:51am July 12, 2013

➸ Trying to find the right words: autisticweirdo: Trying to find the right words: An...

autisticweirdo:

Trying to find the right words: An aside

stripesweatersandwaterbottles:

autisticweirdo:

I will judge you so fucking hard if you say that “autistic people aren’t sociopaths". Like woooo, yeahhh! Way to shit on other people to make a point about how autistic…

Oh good grief not another fucking shibboleth with which we can judge most of the population horrible irredeemable people for using a word exactly as they’ve been taught the word means.

Shibboleths are ordinary words (not actual slurs) whose use or pronunciation marks someone as inside our outside a certain group. In extreme cases they are used to catch and execute foreign spies. In less extreme cases they’re used so you know who to judge or shun. In all cases I find them a shitty thing to do to people.

In most cases (until Sherlock came out), sociopath has always meant, to most people, someone without a conscience. Not someone diagnosable with ASPD – that term came after sociopath entered common vocabulary, and is often just used to make criminals psychiatry’s domain. Not someone who lacks, or believes they lack, or lacks automatic, empathy. Someone without a conscience.

That’s how practically everyone I know uses the term. Now apparently practically everyone I know, including me, is a bad person. Because we aren’t telepathic enough to know one person has started using it on themselves with an extremely non-standard meaning. So then because they have done that, everyone who uses the standard meaning must be judged for it because we don’t automatically know or accept a highly non-standard meaning of the word.

And as usually with these damn shibboleths – lame, stupid, now sociopath too – the people most affected are cognitively disabled people who have trouble adding or subtracting words from our vocabularies. Including me. So don’t expect me to join on this bandwagon to turn sociopath into a whole new word.

Plus I need the word with its usual meanings. I’ve been badly hurt by a couple sociopaths at different times in my life. I need a word to describe them. It’s rare I can coin new words, add new words, subtract old words, or even substitute a series of words for a word I already use, it has to do with the entire way my language system works.

So if you’re going to get offended every time I refer to a sociopath as a sociopath, then just unfollow me right now. Spare me the fight over my language usage. I never actually believed anyone would go as far as to do this, the only time I heard someone getting offended about the use of that word, it was one of those anti-SJ trolls. (Note again I’m neither SJ nor anti-SJ. They look to close to the same to me.) I never thought someone would cook up an actual reason to get offended by it.

But seriously. Think about what you’re doing. Just in posting things like this, you’re going to convince a lot of people you’re automatically right. Because there’s a lot of people on tumblr who are always poised and ready to remember new “bad” words. And all of those people are going to now be ready to demonize anyone who won’t or can’t change their language. Which is actually most speakers of the English language, because they’re not telepathic and haven’t heard of this one person who made up a new definition of sociopath.

But it’s going to especially affect certain autistic people and certain other cognitively disabled people who can’t, or can’t easily enough, make changes to our vocabularies.

So think hard every time you decide to demonize people for not using words exactly how you do. For anything less than a severe slur – the n word, the r word, the k word, etc. – it is absolutely not worth it, to me, to declare a word off limits. And practically never worth it to radically change the meaning and usage of ordinary words that most people already have meanings for, and demonize anyone who still uses the first most common meaning. And if you ARE going to come up with a new usage for an old word, even if it’s somewhat related to the old usage, then you need to be prepared for people to misunderstand you every single time you call yourself that, and to hear the word used in its original meaning far more than in the meaning you made up. And it’s probably best not to get offended about that.

And the world does need a word for people who lack a conscience. English has such a word: sociopath. It is not the job of every English speaker to redefine the word, just because you have. Yes meanings can change, but you can’t force meanings to change by judging everyone who doesn’t adopt your new meaning.

A good example is one relatively new British usage of the word disabled. It means not having a medical problem, but rather having a society not built for you. It started in the seventies. More people adopted it than will probably ever adopt your friend’s meaning of sociopath.

BUT.

Even so. There are lots of people, especially outside Britain, who use disability the same way those particular British people use the word impairment. In America it’s still common to hear people say “my disability is paraplegia”, and that’s not a wrong usage of the word, and it’s definitely wrong to judge people for saying it that way.

Some people do judge you for not using British social model terminology mind you. But they would be wrong to do so. And it’s even more wrong to judge people for using sociopath to mean lacking a conscience, when probably the only people who use it differently, are either fans of Sherlock misinterpreting a quip on the show, or friends of this one person you know. It just seems very “us against the world” to do so. And also very unfair to people who are doing nothing more than using a word that’s been in use for over a generation to mean someone who lacks a conscience. Not to mention outright discriminatory against anyone who really can’t change our usage so easily.

By these standards. I can take any word that means something bad. Twist its meaning around (intentionally or unintentionally) until it means something not quite so awful, that happens to apply to me. And then condemn anyone who uses it the usual way, as insulting me at best and degrading me at worst. Possible, but pointless and hurtful to a lot of people who never meant me any harm.

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