Lameness Examined
But does anyone actually use “lame” as an epithet for the disabled (using that terminology because it seems to be widely, though not universally, accepted even among the disabled community — see: “Disability Studies” etc.)?
I understand offense toward use of the word “retard,” “cripple,” and lots of other offensive reductive terminology used exclusively toward people with particular conditions. But “lame” is a valid and, frankly, potent and important descriptor that does not merely attach to a class of people. There is NO other use of the other words offered in this critique except as racist descriptions of an entire class of people. But lame has important connotations that have nothing to do with perception of disabled people.
When someone says “man, that was so lame,” there is not even an intimation of: “I link that in my mind to someone with a disability.” [snip]
I’ve only used/heard disability-lame to describe animals, particularly cows that cannot walk (in my experience). The connotation there is that the animal is going to be put down, which makes lame especially weird for use with people [edit in light of this post:] from my narrow perspective!
