Paralympic Language

One of the things one apparently has to watch when describing the Paralympics is the language you use.

One of the things which the athletes who take part are triumphantly refuting is a culture of low expectations. And I gather that one of the ways these low expectations express themselves, which many people with disabilities parcicularly dislike, is the use of overinflated praise for relatively modest accomplishments.

One of my contemporaries at University combined severe physical disabilities with a brilliant mind, considerable public speaking ability, and a passionate hatred of any form of what was then already called "positive discrimination." He single-handedly caused the defeat of more motions on that subject than anyone else I ever knew. Whenever a fellow-student had proposed a motion in the Students Union of the debating union supporting any  form of "positive discrimination" in favour of a disadvantaged group, he would signal to speak against, make his way to the rostrum on his crutches, and then vigorously denounce the proposal as being against the interests of the people it was meant to help, because "This sort of proposal patronises and harms people like me" as everyone would assume that members of that group who got anywhere had done so through quotas or discrimination rather than their own efforts.

Whether you agreed with him or not, by most human standards he was an extremely brave man, but nobody ever called him that in my hearing. We knew he would think it was patronising and hate it. He earned a place at a Russell Group University and graduated on exactly the same basis as the other students there, and was very proud of it.

I was reminded of this when I learned of the British Paralympic Association (BPA)'s  Paralympics language guide which you can read here.

The problem is that words and phrases which are used in everyday life to denote an exceptional performance may be all too frequently applied to people with disabilities just for showing up. And I'm told that they often resent this kind of patronising approach more than open insults.

Of course the irony is that many people with disabilities, as the Paralympic competitors have been showing us, often merit the use of words like "brave" or "inspirational" in the same way that we would apply them to an able-bodied person, but it is not always obvious whether such language is being used in this way or in the condescending way  they are used to hearing.