May 5, 2006 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Language, Media, Rhetoric
This is an incomplete list of words that, in discussions about autism, provoke much response.
[...] Thanks to everyone who added to the list of words on Them’s Fighting Words. I am sure many of those words will come up in my future posts, and while I cannot guarantee I will use them in an “autismly” (”autistically?”) correct–A.C.manner, I will try to use them thoughtfully and carefully. [...]
[...] To the list of fighting words, add [...]
[...] You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Related Posts: Autism: NOT a Curse But Much Love…Them’s FightingWords…I’m not “devastated” about autism…Psychiatrists, the D.S.M., and Drug Makers : A Bad Diagnosis?…Where autism education is needed: Med Schools…Would You Buy This Book?…What CAN I say?… [...]
[...] Talk About Curing Autism (TACA) is a southern California-based organization started by autism parents that–in fighting word fashion–talks about curing autism. These sentences are displayed on the website’s banner: [...]
[...] ……….. I am having a very hard time finishing this post whose vocabulary of more than fighting words–violence, weapons, killing, murder, violence–keeps making me (as it should) shiver. The death of a autistic child at her autism mother’s hands is terrifying even to think about for me, being an autism mother of an autistic child. My mind keeps turning to–frivolously to some, perhaps—Greek mythology, to Greek tragedy, to Agamemnon who allows his daughter Iphigeneia to be sacrificed so that the Greek ships can sail to Troy, in revenge for which his wife Klytemnestra murders him in his bath after he returns home from the war. [...]
[...] Definitely true; my husband and I never, ever give up. But there seems to be an equation here between “curing” child of autism and “something good” happening for those “cured” children with autism. “Cure” is a fighting word in the autism community and I am not comfortable with the Dateline special’s suggestion that only by “curing” an autistic child (like Charlie) of autism can “something good” happen for him. [...]
[...] Recovery is a fighting word in autism circles. Recovery from autism is a big business, in the form of treatments (biomedical, educational, and otherwise) that parents constantly encounter. But rather than noting, as Adams does, that recovery from autism is “different from recovery from everything else,” my thought in being the mother of an autistic child for the past nine years is that “recovery from autism” is not the question that needs to be asked or researched. But how to teach my son to live a good life and to the best of his potential—-those are questions I ask myself everyday, and try to do the best with. Add to: August 12th, 2006 | Permalink | No Comments » [...]
[...] The term “early intervention,” while not a fighting word,” has come to seem not only misleading, but even depressing to me. The term suggests that there is only a very brief “window” — before one’s autistic child turns three — to do as much as possible (read: everything you hear about from the internet, other parents, “experts,” books, TV, someone’s friend who is a social worker). Or, if one “misses” the three-year-old “cutoff,” the next age to be aimed at is five years old, with the hope/goal that one’s child will be able to attend kindergarten and not need special education. (Too, some will object to the notion of “intervening” and “treating” autism.) [...]
[...] should be never more true when we consider using poorly chosen, stigmatising words to describe people. Kathleen’s petition regarding Boyd Haley’s poor choice of words is a case in point. I like to think my petition regarding Autism Speaks poor presentation and supporting justifications is also a case in point. Certainly the 800+ signatures Kathleen has received so far and the 500+ I have received bear testament that there are a lot of people out there who are very very tired of these dangerous words (Kristina calls them ‘fighting words‘) and the people who want to carry on using them to describe people. [...]
[...] To use autism as a metaphor of something else—-of the human condition in the post-modern early 21st century—tells us, Waltz suggests, something about the culture that we live in, but not necessarily about what autism really is—-what it really means to be autistic. Further, to describe autism in metaphors—-as a “nightmare” or “train wreck,” and even an “epidemic,” and an autistic person as a “stolen child” or changeling—is alike a way of distancing oneself from knowing what autism is, by only referring to autistic persons in language, in figures of speech and analogies, that refer back to something else and other than an actual autistic person. To paraphrase Susan Sontag in Illness and Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (2001), autism is “not a metaphor” and, as Sontag writes, …..the most truthful way of regarding illness—-and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. (p. 3) [...]
[...] “treatments,” and “cure” are “fighting words” in the autism community and I am curious about the response to the IAN, which I have indeed [...]
[...] is any publicity necessarily good publicity? Is the “Ransom Notes” campaign so full of fighting words, the image it portrays of autism and the other conditions so “harsh and upsetting,” [...]
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Jeff lives in New York with his wife Jill and two small sons. He is the author of Alex: The Fathering of a Preemie and Alex the Boy: Episodes From a Family’s Life With Autism, and maintains a sit... more
Jill used to write frequently about food, until having kids made writing frequently impossible. She is the author of "Have a Nice Trip," first published in Brain, Child Magazine, which is her resp... more
Jeff Stimpson
Jill Cornfield
autistic vs. “person with autism”
Camille, did I add the right word?
aversives, thimerosol, poisoned, damaged, stolen children…
just to add a few
Oh, and “devastating”.
I’d add: train wrecks, plague, disease.
I can’t believe I forgot to mention: “national emergency” (ASA 2004, after that I refused to go to anything their president spoke at), I see you got epidemic, and the ever tactful “tsunami”.
Hi Kritina, yeah, “person with autism” is not always bad but some parents really don’t want their kids called “autisic.”
“empty shell” that came by way of Portia Iverson (of CAN) from someone she knew… or maybe it was the “kidnapped” analogy…
“Abubakar Tariq Nadama” is a testy one, some people think he should never be mentioned again.
“geek” it’s sort of like the “n” word. It depends on how it’s said and by whom. Lenny called asperger’s adults, “Geeks and savants with ticks [sic] doing tricks” That was purely mean spirited.
Sorry,
“Kristina” and “autistic” I had two bad typos there in the first two lines.
Camille, at least you didn’t spell my name “Ch”ristina……..
Do you have a reference for the (very unnecessary) Lenny Schafter quotation?
Camille, don’t forget “pin the label on the dorky” for Schafer quotes.
I think most anything that comes from Lenny is fightin’ words. Not only because he is offensive, but because if he ever tries to grab my arm and talk (down) to me again, there will be fightin’.
http://www.neurodiversity.com/inquisition.html
Kathleen Seidel corresponded with Lenny about the essay he put in the SAR (here: http://lists.envirolink.org/pipermail/sareport/Week-of-Mon-20050103/000347.html) in which he wrote about “geeks” and savants with ticks [sic] doing tricks:
“You have referred to “those who would define Aspergers or autism as little more than an odd-ball minority lifestyle made up of ‘geeks’ and savants with ticks doing tricks,” and “the very real, if not romantic ‘culture of autism’ in which anyone who taps a pencil can opt themselves in as a member.” Who exactly has offered such a definition? No one that I am aware of has offered such definitions or lighthearted self-diagnoses. What is the point in creating opponents where there are none?”
So, I misremembered the context of the quote, he didn’t say Asperger’s people were “geeks” etc, there in that quote, but said that that is how people like me portrayed AS. He was saying that we make a neurodevelopmental syndrome/condition/disorder into nothing but a lifestyle choice.
His statement was entirely out of line and reading it, to me, it felt like he was slinging racial slurs at us for standing up to his version of autism. “Schafer Autism,” by definition says that Temple Grandin is not autistic. (he had said that anyone who can be employed is not autistic) I asked him directly by email “Is Temple Grandin autistic?” and he didn’t answer.
Camille, thanks for the reference. The notion of Aspergers’s and autism as a “lifestyle” choice is pretty…….well, many more fighting words come to mind.
In the same post as he made the “pin the label on the dorky” comment, he did call Temple Grandin autistic (in fact said she would make a good model of an autistic person rather than Rain Man). But that was before he decided to declare war on all autistics with different opinions than his.
I suppose we can add “monster” to this list of words now…
Maybe “ogre” too……