Kerry DoughertyTHE NIGHT my Aunt Agnes was born, there was panic in the little house on Prince Street.
In a cramped, humid bedroom, my grandmother labored more than 20 agonizing hours trying to deliver her first child. Outside the door, my grandfather was frantic. Finally, he grabbed the town doctor by the shirt and ordered him to do something.
He had every reason to be afraid. Two years earlier - around 1917 - my grandfather's first wife and baby had died in childbirth. In that same stifling room.
Perhaps rattled by my grandfather's rage, the doctor grabbed his forceps. Moments later, my Aunt Agnes was yanked into the world.
My grandmother never forgave the two men for what they did. It was immediately apparent something was wrong with the baby. Her head was misshapen. She was limp and didn't cry.
As time passed, she was slow to sit. Slower still to walk. At 3, she barely talked. By the end of first grade, Agnes hadn't mastered the alphabet or made a friend. Her younger brothers could do things she couldn't.
Worst of all, she was teased mercilessly by other children.
During second grade, my grandmother was summoned to the school.
"We can't teach Agnes," the principal said bluntly. "Put her in an institution. She's retarded."
"She is not," my grandmother cried. "It was the forceps."
So Agnes was home-schooled before anyone called it that. Slowly, she learned to read and write. Even so, she spent the rest of her life by my grandmother's side.
Once, in a restaurant, a man at a nearby table made a loud crack about the "retarded girl" at ours.
Agnes looked stricken. My grandmother patted her arm. My father leapt to his feet and hissed something at the ignoramus. It must have been good. The guy left.
Why am I telling you this? Because the Virginia Senate has approved a bill that would erase the word "retarded" from the Code of Virginia and replace it with "intellectually disabled."
It's difficult to imagine a more well-meaning bill. Or a more Orwellian one. If it becomes law, hundreds of other laws will have to be rewritten. Signs, letterheads, job titles and business cards may have to be revised. All to purge a word with an established clinical and legal meaning.
This is one more attempt to sanitize the English language, to remove words that can offend and replace them with bland euphemisms.
The real problem with the word "retarded" is not that it appears in the state code. It's that people use the term to insult those with low IQs.
Laws can't fix that. The General Assembly can't stop children on the playground from being unspeakably cruel. Nor can it make dolts in restaurants think before opening their big mouths.
Kerry Dougherty, (757) 446-2306, kerry.dougherty@cox.net
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Money well wasted!
Of all the things the government wastes are money on.... This one I don't mind, even welcome.
This is not an attempt to sanitize the English language but to sensitize and make more accurate. When a word that describes a portion of are society (that we should be protecting)..
Takes on such a negative overture,that children and even adults use it as an insult it’s time to change it
I'm surprised by your article.....As a writer you must know the power of just a word?
PC
The political correctness runs amok yet again. It will only get worse. Someday you will have to have a lawyer with a degree in PC with you at all times and run everything through them first even if just to say "Hello" so you avoid a lawsuit.
Derogatory Terms or Official Language
I'm not in favor of rewriting anything official or legal using 2 words, when only one will suffice. But I do think that anyone who uses any word to belittle or make another person uncomfortable should have their own IQ checked. There can be no possible tangible gain by insulting another person who wished you no ill will prior to a verbal attack.
Political correctness run amok
No amount of sanitization of the English language is going to change some people's attitudes toward handicapped or disabled persons. I, for one, am handicapped, and I am not ashamed of it. I do not want to be referred to as "physically challenged", and I am sure there are others who agree with me. We are so afraid of "offending" that we tiptoe around almost anyone and anything. I have learned the hard way that life deals out some hard knocks, and the only thing to do is get back up and try again. Words (or the abuse of them) are merely a reflection of one's prejudices. Substituting cheesy euphemisms is only a band-aid solution.
Let's take it in context and lighten up.
It's about time that somebody tried to get it right. It's all caused by people that hear the word's, not the word itself. Lots of words, the latest of which is "lynch". People calling for some girls job because she used the word lynch, basically as a compliment to a golfer that probably can't get beat by anyone on a golf course so the only way to beat him is to lynch him, or tie him to a tree in the woods somewhere, or maybe take him out feed him good ,lots of drinks and hope he passes out and miss's his T-time.......get the picture? Granted I am a 60 year old white man that hears the word lynch and thinks of what they did to bank robbers in the old cowboy movies. When a word is taken out of context and twisted to someone else's perverted meaning and they get it to stick just goes to show how small minded many activists are. It keeps them in work. Lighten up people, they are just words. Consider the source, shake your head, maybe chuckle to yourself a little ,turn your back and walk away. Some of these words, if answered with just such a reaction, might just get the person speaking them to think about what they just said.