intent

[pauraque_bk]

Earlier I was reading a blog post by a person who thinks using the word "lame" to mean "bad" is ableist. Of course, the vast majority of people who use the word that way are not intending to make people with disabilities feel bad, or even thinking about people with disabilities at all. In linguistics it's called semantic drift -- the sense of the word drifts until non-linguists are no longer conscious of the original sense. To most people who say "lame", the word means only "bad".

Their intentions are pure, so they feel perfectly justified in saying so, as they did in the comments to this blog post. They didn't mean to be offensive, and intent is what matters.

I don't actually think that intent does trump effect, but I'm surprised that people so often get stuck on that point when there's an even more devastating counter-argument to be made.

When you didn't know there were people who were hurt by the word, your intentions were pure. Now that you *do* know, going into the future, your intentions are not pure. You know it's a word that hurts some people's feelings, so in using the word, you're consciously deciding to take the risk that someone's going to be hurt in a specific way that you already know about. (This differentiates it from all the other ways that you could possibly hurt someone that you don't know about yet!) Once you know, there's no un-knowing, there is only ignoring. You could use a different word, but you choose not to. You're no longer innocent and your intentions can no longer be described as good.

Comments

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's the best counter-argument that I've seen. FWD posted about it a few times, too - no, disabled activists aren't expecting everyone to automatically know what's appropriate but they are expecting you to at least try to learn.

Weirdly enough, while I see "lame" being used to be "bad" online, offline I only hear it meaning "an animal having trouble walking". The joys of rural life!

[pauraque]

In the area where I grew up (I can't really speak for here, which is much more animal-filled and might be different), I think young people knew that "lame" had a "difficulty walking" sense if they thought about it -- they wouldn't be completely lost if it was used that way in a book -- but it wasn't something that was used in everyday life. It seemed like an archaic usage.