Interesting post from the Canadian Medical Association.
Kenneth St. Louis grew up with a
moderate stutter that he eventually got under control in college. His
struggle with
stuttering led to an interest in
speech-language pathology, which he now teaches at West Virginia
University in Morgantown.
St. Louis is an expert in fluency
disorders, including cluttering, a condition characterized by rapid
speech with an erratic
rhythm. Once, after a journal sent him
the edited version of a paper he had submitted on cluttering, St. Louis
noticed something
curious.
"They changed 'clutterer' to
'person who clutters' all the way through," says St. Louis.
The changes to St. Louis' prose
stem from the person-first (or people-first) language movement, which began some 20 years ago to promote the concept that a person shouldn't be defined by a diagnosis. By literally putting
"person" first in language,
what was once a label becomes a mere
characteristic. No longer are there "disabled people." Instead, there
are "people with
disabilities."
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