Dear visitor, this is a machine-translated article. It makes perfect sense in its original language (Czech), and is fully backed by independent scientific literature. The translation, though, is far from perfect and takes patience and imagination, if you decide to read it.

Drobečková navigace

The right words for sickness and sick

In brief: Once it was called blind, deaf, it was replaced by the blind, the deaf, and then the visually impaired. On the initiative of the sick themselves, today, we are switching to factual descriptions of the state of health. Simple words like blind, deaf are acceptable again, even more suitable than evasive euphemisms. And it's not just that fashion goes in circles - the main reason is surprisingly the effort to preserve the greatest dignity of the sick.

The change comes as usual in English. Anglo-French have weakness for euphemisms. In the chain of euphemisms, they have gone so far as to begin to call the people with disabilities "people with reduced ability". But when the excitement of replacing short-word words of the "blind", "deaf" descriptions unsuitable for infamy, people realized that the euphemistic description actually carries out judgments about abilities, which is even worse than a simple statement of the disease. Beethoven was deaf, Maresjev was legless, but he did not have reduced capacities (not at least compared to ordinary people). In an effort to address this, "disability" was further replaced by the cover word "challenge" as in the untranslatable "mentally challenged". Next, the term "differently able" appeared, perhaps translated as "otherwise adapted", perhaps because of the fact that fashion psychiatric diagnoses (autism, pseudomonas "child hyperactivity with attention deficit disorder, Asperger syndrome ...) But the Beethoven insisted they were only deaf, and if they were "otherwise adapted", not because of their deafness. They have adapted their disability according to their possibilities, they know best what they are and are unable and feel embarrassed when others pretend to be true what is not true. The story of the English euphemisms for the handicapped I watched only marginally to be "in" in grammar, so I think a little bit, but that's how it was. These topics, in particular, have certainly been written in the United States, all of which, they are, for various strange "social group studies", so there should be no need for refinement of the literature for those interested.

Most recently, in the professional labeling of diseases, it was no longer possible to see if the words were used as pejorativa, and the factual importance of them began to be taken into account. Perhaps "crippled" is back in. (Do not mess with the creten, which is the most staggering euphemism I know.) In English there are whole guidelines on how to use the words "impairment" ⊃ "disability" ⊃ "handicap". In Czech, the situation is less pronounced. Cover concepts of "physically / mentally handicapped" are still descriptive and do not impose any trials, although for their greatest glory, a deeper factual description of the disability is considered as inaccurate. In fact, the only word that can furiously be thrown is the disease / sick, which, after the English model, is replaced by the preferred forms of disease / ill. I write this text a little bit too much to show that I know about it, even if I do not want to avoid the ill-used words sick, ill, hospital. Otherwise, I welcome the development towards etymological accuracy. I hope that it will lead to the emancipation of other short, etymologically correct nosyms and ethnoms, which have been mistakenly censored as merely defamation.

| 2010 - 24.1.2018