I'm...I'm...not...handi...handi
Posted on 07/05/2013 9:10:36 AM PDT by Deadeye Division
A local self-advocacy group for people with developmental disabilities is asking Columbus and Franklin County to officially retire the word handicap whenever new accessibility signs are erected.
The advocates want the old description replaced with accessible, the wheelchair symbol or, perhaps even better, a zippy new icon recently adopted in New York City that looks like a wheelchair figure on the move.
“With handicap, that sounds like they’re making fun of us,” said Marci Straughter, a member of the Self-Advocate Advisory Council of the Franklin County Board of Developmental Disabilities. “It’s time for a change, and we want to make this happen.”
Language is often at the forefront of the self-advocacy movement, which scored a big victory in 2009 when the words mental retardation were dropped from the names of state and county agencies that serve Ohioans with developmental disabilities.
“Language does hurt,” said Sadie Hunter, executive director of People First of Ohio. “Taking the word handicap away strengthens people. And it just takes a little bit of effort to make these changes.”
Columbus and Franklin County officials say they are willing to make sure that new and replacement signs for parking areas, buildings, bathrooms and other areas do not include the word handicap or handicapped.
Advocates say they hope the public stand will prompt private-sector signs to change, too.
In a letter sent to the city and county about a week ago, the self-advocate council forwarded resolutions passed in Cincinnati and Hamilton County to eliminate handicapped on public signs.
On newer signs and buildings, the changes already have been made, local officials said. But some old signs, such as those posted at the Franklin County Courthouse, 373 S. High St., still use the word handicap.
County Commissioner Marilyn Brown said she’ll push to make the phase-in official.
“We have to be welcoming in our language,” said Brown, whose adult daughter uses a wheelchair. “ It seems like a natural for us to just continue as we change signage, to change it to be far more positive and use the contemporary verbiage.”
Hunter said some Ohioans want to trade the rigid wheelchair symbol for the active icon developed by the Accessibility Icon Project and make it available on license plates.
That icon meets federal standards and has been adopted in cities in New York, Massachusetts, Texas, Canada and western Europe, said Boston-area professor Brian Glenney, project co-founder.
“We haven’t gotten any pushback, and we’ve been going for three years,” Glenney said. “It’s a slow phase-in, like how words are being changed. As the words evolve, symbols should evolve as well.”
rprice@dispatch.com
This is ++ good.
Wth? As if political correctness hadn’t gone far enough. Soon they’ll declare being disabled isn’t actually treatable, it’s just another variation, and any attempt to help disabled people will be called bigoted.
I'm...I'm...not...handi...handi
Handicapped was intended to replace crippled, so now that is too derogatory?....PC run amok............
“other abled” I believe is the new PC term.
The new proposed symbol look like the figure in the wheelchair is either getting ready to stand (”Stand up, Chuck!”) or is pitching forward and falling out.
Handicapped parking, access, etc, is a good thing but, like everything else PC, the idiots on the left just cannot leave ANYTHING alone.
The City of Boulder, Colo. spent a couple of hundred thousand dollars replacing the term “Man Hole” with “Utility Access Cover”.
Yes, I remember when it was okay to say crippled.
I remember someone I knew did volunteer work with the Crippled Children’s League. Probably that organization either changed their name or disbanded long ago.
Then, somewhere along the way, the word crippled became some sort of insult, and we were supposed to say handicapped or disabled.
Who can keep up with the PC changes in the language?
Back in the early 1990s the City of Toronto decreed that manholes shall henceforth be referred to as “access holes”. They changed their minds after a road contractor put up signs in a construction zone that read, “Caution- RAISED A-HOLES IN ROAD”.
Why even try? Whatever it is you’re doing, it’s wrong.
I am firmly resolved, should my osteoarthritis finally get to the point where it is debilitating, or for any other reason I should need to use a cane or walker, or lose the use of one or both hands, that I will refer to myself as “a cripple”. Even “handicapped” is wussy. Euphemism is a plague on language.
Those parking permits are over issued anyway. Where I work there are literally dozens of these permits given out to people on Prozac and Xanax. I guess giving them a parking spot closer to the store makes them less anguished. Now I see expecting mother parking spaces popping up too.
Transabled
I don't think that's the fundamental driving force here.
At a fundamental level, these people think they can change reality by changing human perception of reality, and they think they can change perception by changing language.
This is just "magic thinking," dressed up like a professor and smoking a pipe, or smoking something anyway.
What happens is that after some time goes by (a few decades, for instance) and nothing has changed since the last language modification, someone comes up with the idea of changing the language again.
Nothing will change in the real world after the new name change, but it makes the magic thinkers feel like they're "doing something."
Magic thinking is a symptom of mental illness btw.
LOL! Good one.
Now it’s Muslims praying.
As a man who has been disabled from birth, even handicapped, I must say that most “activists” for the handicapped are professionally outraged and, to be brutally honest, are in it for the money. A pretty penny can be made by stirring the pot.
I have been involved with too many of these jackasses over the years and they are truly parasites.
I know an old cowboy who is always “gimped up”.
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