I Can't Believe You've Just Said That... Part 1

The other day, I was chatting with my sixteen-year-old son in the car on the way home from school, and happened to mention that a friend of mine, who worked with autistic children, had moved from working at a mainstream school to a special school. There was a peculiar silence, and my son said,

'I can't believe you've just said that.'

After another, this time rather confused, silence, he explained that among his peers, the word 'special' has a different connotation. Not exactly an insult, but rather a self-deprecatory term, used to make a joke about oneself if one had done something a bit silly or clumsy. My son couldn't believe that the kind of school I was referring to was really called a 'special' school. He knew the original usage of the word, but had assumed, because of the way it was now used among his peers, that it must have been abandoned. Strangely, he was happy with the use in acronyms such as SEN (special educational needs) but uncomfortable when it was applied to a school.

'So do people use it as an insult to other people?' I asked. 'In an aggressive way?'

Apparently not, among his own circle of friends. But he was sure there were plenty who would hurl the word 'special' across the street to someone who had annoyed them. As he pointed out, people who are determined to be unpleasant or insulting love new ways to be so. In fact, once when he was a small boy, he had the dubious distinction of upsetting his sister by calling her a 'Martin-maker'. He was cross, and didn't know any words bad enough, so he made one up. It worked. She cried.

But didn't he and his friends have a problem with it being insulting to people with learning disabilities, or physical difficulties such as deafness or cerebral palsy? Not really, he said, because in their subculture, they don't think of it as referring to people with severe needs, but to people who are just not particularly clever. However, they do feel that as a term, it deserves some mockery, because it is a form of euphemism. They saw it as a kind of overdone political correctness. It was something to do with the transfer of the word 'special' from being an adjective describing needs to one describing an institution: it has the effect of changing the meaning of the word from 'of a particular kind', to 'superior' or 'held in esteem'.

Now I don't know what I think about all this. My son goes to a school where everybody is pretty clever. And I know he wouldn't dream of mocking anyone who had physical or learning difficulties. However, he was uncomfortable with hearing me use the word, so obviously he feels that there are appropriate and inappropriate contexts. But does everyone? How does this type of word become used as a general insult? At what stage does it become totally unacceptable? Will there be a time when we can no longer call a school a Special School, because it has insulting connotations? A time when a school's SENCO has to have a title change?

This reminded me of a conversation that I had with one of my daughters a few years ago, when she was also about sixteen. A photograph of her had been published in the local newspaper, and she was analysing (as one does) how dreadful she thought she looked in it.

'And what am I doing with my hand?' she wailed. 'It looks totally spastic.'

And what did I say..?

'I can't believe you've just said that.'

As a child of the sixties, I grew up in a time when people with cerebral palsy were referred to as spastic. It was a neutral medical term, referring to an altered skeletal/muscle performance due to a tightening of muscle tone. This kind of movement impairment occurs in 80% of cerebral palsy sufferers. The main cerebral palsy charity in the UK was founded in 1951, and was called The Spastic Society.

But as I grew older, the word 'spastic', rather than just referring to a medical condition, became an insult. You could hear it every day in the corridors and on the playing fields of my comprehensive school.

In 1994 The Spastics Society changed its name to Scope. A neutral medical term had been almost completely subsumed by offensiveness. In 2007, the Sussex University linguist Lynne Murphy, described it as "one of the most taboo insults to a British ear".

My daughter, however, was completely unaware of this. She had heard friends use it, and made inferences based upon observation - the way we all learn our native language. She thought it was a neutral word, and had no idea it made any reference to disability. To her, it had appeared to mean 'unnatural looking', or 'posed awkwardly'. She was horrified when I told her the history of the word and all its connotations. And indeed, my son tells me that for his peer group the word does not have connotations of disability either, it just means 'awkward'.

Of course the English language is littered with words that have changed their meanings in a similar way. Moron, cretin, idiot - all of these are terms that were once neutral medical terms which metamorphosed into terms of abuse, and in general usage lost their specific individual meanings. Thinking about my daughter's use of the word 'spastic', I wonder if, as we move further away from the original meanings, do they lose their strength as insults? And if they are cut free from their original meanings, are they still as offensive to people who fall within the scope of their original definition?

I don't know. To me it feels that all these words are offensive when used in a context intended to offend. But some of them are offensive at any time. I'm happy to call myself an idiot if I've done something stupid, and although 'moron' is not a word I like, I can imagine a few contexts in which I might describe someone as 'moronic'. But to me 'spastic' is still taboo, except in the strict medical sense. And there are words which I won't even type because I find them so offensive.

I know I shall still try to challenge the use of words that are offensive to any person, or group of people. Words that draw on people's difference from others or their oppression by others. However, it's easy to challenge your own children, or your partner, or indeed for them to challenge you. Challenging other people can be, shall we say, challenging.

More of that another time.