In a building near the one where I work, the title of this post is inscribed next to every elevator door on every floor: "Priority access to persons with disabilities." It makes my skin crawl. It's wrong in every way and on every level. If Satan himself had set out to debase human communication so as to prevent us from working together, I sincerely doubt that he could have found a more apt device than the one he posted there. How is it wrong? Let me count the ways:
We'll start with the grammatically trivial: "Priority" is, or was until recently, a noun. No need to risk a hernia consulting the OED; even Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary says "priority" is a noun. Is this vile sign a harbinger of things to come? Is "priority" the new "quality?" One shudders, sighs, and moves on.
"Access" is fair enough, and "to" seems harmless, so let's move on to "persons." The author, if I may use that word to describe the person who wrote this, presumable thought the elevators might be robust enough to carry more than one person, and struggled valiantly to find a plural. Sadly, though the struggle was valiant, it was in vain. "Person" does actually have a plural in English. Yes, that's right; it's "people." So where does "persons" come from? Well, it actually is a word in English, but not in the sort of English that's suited to discussing the skills and talents of the occupants of elevators; its use is properly restricted to legal discourse. Legal "persons" come in two flavors: natural persons (i.e., people) and artificial persons such as governments, corporations, trusts, estates and other arcane inventions that are deemed fit subjects of rights that can be defended in court. Microsoft is a "person" in this sense, and so is Iceland, but even the lawyers who devised this strange sort of personhood didn't have the effrontery to call them "people;" hence, "persons."
Much as I honor and respect Microsoft, and Iceland even more, I draw the line at surrendering my place on a crowded elevator to either of them. Even if poor MIT had all of its legs amputated after a horrific accident that left WalMart dead and my grandmother's estate on afterlife-support, I would still not let the hobbled technical institute have my place. It can wait for the next elevator for all I care.
That leaves us with "disabilities." Disabilities are in plentiful supply. Let's see; there's blindness, deafness, stupidity, Broca's aphasia, Wernicke's aphasia, cleft palate, attention deficit disorder, coma, stuttering, stammering, cerebral palsy, bad judgment, astigmatism, anorgasmia, and, oh yes, there's being crippled, too. People -- sorry, persons -- with any of these afflictions get to jump the queue for the elevators. Well, most of them can jump the queue. The crippled ones just have to ram the queue with their wheelchairs, or clear some space with a few strokes of the cane.
One wonders, though, why all these variously imperfect persons should have "priority access" to the elevators. Do the blind really have a better claim than the rest of us to vertical transportation? The deaf? I suspect not. In fact, I suspect that the sign was really only intended to give special consideration to the crippled, but the authors dared not say so in English, because "crippled," as a word describing an undesirable condition, is an undesirable word, and not fit for use in public. To the various problems that plague the lives of the crippled, we add one more: They're banned from polite discourse, to be hidden away in a crowd of other nondescript persons with disabilities.
In one final irony, the building in which the sign appears is managed by forward thinking people who are always on the lookout for ways to improve the work environment of their human resources. One very bad thing that may occasionally happen in a work environment is that someone might smoke in it; not out in the open, of course, but hidden away in the stairwells. So the managers nipped the problem in the bud; they locked the stairwells, making the stairs accessible only in case of fire. By this simple and considerate act, they have put us all on the same plane together. The blind, the stupid, the crippled and the mountaineer are all equal persons in their disability; none can get to the fourth floor without an elevator, and thus, our cherished sign -- "Priority access to persons with disabilities" -- is rendered absolutely meaningless at every level.
We'll start with the grammatically trivial: "Priority" is, or was until recently, a noun. No need to risk a hernia consulting the OED; even Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary says "priority" is a noun. Is this vile sign a harbinger of things to come? Is "priority" the new "quality?" One shudders, sighs, and moves on.
"Access" is fair enough, and "to" seems harmless, so let's move on to "persons." The author, if I may use that word to describe the person who wrote this, presumable thought the elevators might be robust enough to carry more than one person, and struggled valiantly to find a plural. Sadly, though the struggle was valiant, it was in vain. "Person" does actually have a plural in English. Yes, that's right; it's "people." So where does "persons" come from? Well, it actually is a word in English, but not in the sort of English that's suited to discussing the skills and talents of the occupants of elevators; its use is properly restricted to legal discourse. Legal "persons" come in two flavors: natural persons (i.e., people) and artificial persons such as governments, corporations, trusts, estates and other arcane inventions that are deemed fit subjects of rights that can be defended in court. Microsoft is a "person" in this sense, and so is Iceland, but even the lawyers who devised this strange sort of personhood didn't have the effrontery to call them "people;" hence, "persons."
Much as I honor and respect Microsoft, and Iceland even more, I draw the line at surrendering my place on a crowded elevator to either of them. Even if poor MIT had all of its legs amputated after a horrific accident that left WalMart dead and my grandmother's estate on afterlife-support, I would still not let the hobbled technical institute have my place. It can wait for the next elevator for all I care.
That leaves us with "disabilities." Disabilities are in plentiful supply. Let's see; there's blindness, deafness, stupidity, Broca's aphasia, Wernicke's aphasia, cleft palate, attention deficit disorder, coma, stuttering, stammering, cerebral palsy, bad judgment, astigmatism, anorgasmia, and, oh yes, there's being crippled, too. People -- sorry, persons -- with any of these afflictions get to jump the queue for the elevators. Well, most of them can jump the queue. The crippled ones just have to ram the queue with their wheelchairs, or clear some space with a few strokes of the cane.
One wonders, though, why all these variously imperfect persons should have "priority access" to the elevators. Do the blind really have a better claim than the rest of us to vertical transportation? The deaf? I suspect not. In fact, I suspect that the sign was really only intended to give special consideration to the crippled, but the authors dared not say so in English, because "crippled," as a word describing an undesirable condition, is an undesirable word, and not fit for use in public. To the various problems that plague the lives of the crippled, we add one more: They're banned from polite discourse, to be hidden away in a crowd of other nondescript persons with disabilities.
In one final irony, the building in which the sign appears is managed by forward thinking people who are always on the lookout for ways to improve the work environment of their human resources. One very bad thing that may occasionally happen in a work environment is that someone might smoke in it; not out in the open, of course, but hidden away in the stairwells. So the managers nipped the problem in the bud; they locked the stairwells, making the stairs accessible only in case of fire. By this simple and considerate act, they have put us all on the same plane together. The blind, the stupid, the crippled and the mountaineer are all equal persons in their disability; none can get to the fourth floor without an elevator, and thus, our cherished sign -- "Priority access to persons with disabilities" -- is rendered absolutely meaningless at every level.
2 comments:
I had a look in the Government of Canada Core Subject Thesaurus, and "Persons with disabilities" is actually the preferred term for people with physical disabilities. The term "cripple" is considered so outdated that it doesn't even appear as a variation.
So while it doesn't really make sense, it is at least partially correct, for some definitions of correct.
I wouldn't take the Government of Canada as authoritative on this. They've hired the same people who caused the problem to write their thesaurus. The term "cripple" is considered outdated for just one reason: The author thinks that cripples are so disgusting that a euphemism is needed to underdescribe them.
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