The Autistic/Has Autism Question
August 20, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Language, Stereotypes
“Autistics” simply do not exist.
writes journalist Dan Olmsted in an Age of Autism post on the use of the word “retard” in the movie Tropic Thunder. He “really can’t stand” it when the “people with autism” are referred to as “autistics,” and he sees the word as a “corollary of ‘retards’.”
Olmsted refers here to an ongoing debate in the autism community, about whether to use the adjective “autistic” or the preposition/noun phrase “with autism.” Some prefer to say “autistic” to suggest that autism is part of a person; others prefer “with autism,” as it’s thought that this phrase suggests that autism is separate from a person. More recently, autistic adults and self-advocates (as on autistics.org) have been using the word “autistic” as a noun to describe themselves. Olmsted seems to think that using “autistics” to describe oneself is not the most appropriate and expresses a wish that persons who self-identify as autistic might “rethink the matter.”
Olmsted’s “best argument” for why it’s incorrect to use “autistics” as a noun is that
“In my Webster’s, at least, there is no such use of the word.”
Words’ definitions change and evolve over time; words acquire meaning and new meanings through common usage, well before they are added to dictionaries and become “official,” and one individual can hardly be the arbiter of accepted usage. As Olmsted is not himself (as far as I know) autistic/has autism, it seems that it might be well for him to leave this matter of semantics and nomenclature to others, and in particular to those who have chosen to say that they are, yes, autistic.
Jeff Stimpson
Jill Cornfield