From: LAURIE DRAUS <draus>
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 12:24:57 -0500

I'm sorry if I sound politically incorrect, and this is just my personal opinion, not any official view of the school, but the "People First Language" strikes me as "Meaning Well" for the sake of coming across as "Doing Something Positive". I am afraid I don't see a it as being truly useful to ascribe a lot of significance to word order that really doesn't exist in the language as normally used.

I'm sure there are nothing but good intentions behind this movement, and certainly we should make every effort to recognize people for their more important individual qualities over and above any disabilities or lessened abilities, and that finding ways to do this is an admirable goal.

But I don't think we should make some up if they aren't there. I'm not sure at all that rearranging normal English sentence structure or marking one order of adjective/noun, noun/adjective as thoughtfully humanizing and sensitive, and the other as thougtlessly pigeon-holing and insensitive is going to affect anyone's intentions or feelings on the subject except giving them a new way they have to go over their words to make sure they say things in a prescribed format so as not to come across to the media-checkers as uncaring when they never were to start with.

I am not on the outside of this issue looking in, or looking down. I myself have ADD as does one of my daughters. My son has fairly severe autism. It doesn't bother me or impress me or make me feel the speaker/writer sees my son, for example, as a real person first, one way or the other, if a teacher or an article were to call my son an autistic student or a student with autism.

I don't see anything truly progressive here in marking one good and one bad. I work with teachers in special education and I don't think there is any less personal dedication or thinking of the student as a person first if I hear a teacher talking about an IEP meeting for a hearing-impaired sixth-grader, vs. one talking about one for a student "with hearing impairment."

Neither strikes me as better or more compassionate or more sensitive and unprejudiced than the other. Why? Because it's just one of the normal ways adjectives are structured in the English language. The order rarely carries any real weight or intent. There is nothing inherent in English syntax in any other context I can think of that makes using an adjective first in a description somehow disdainful or dismissive of the subject.

A snow-covered mountain, or a mountain covered with snow, both conjure up the same picture. I don't think that either arrangement gives it any significantly measurable level of "mountain-ness" than the other way. A brown book, a book that's brown. A long hall, a hall that's long. A tall policeman, a policeman who's tall. English just doesn't naturally present one way as nicer and one ruder than the other.

Most everyday people are not going to feel there is truly any positive or negative meaning given by the order of the words if there never is in any other sentence they use in their everyday lives. It will strike them as artificial, I think.

I do agree with the person who said that using *just* the adjective and leaving out the part that refers to the person can in many instances sound cold and rude: a Chinese, a black, an autistic. I *would* think less of a teacher who said that they had "two blinds and three LD's this afternoon."

I will work at using the "proper" structure in official school business because I see this becoming "an issue." But I think it is not really sound, because starts out from the point of a fallacy--that in our language, using an adjective first belittles the noun. That just isn't so.



Lauri Cahoon-Draus K-12 Library Media Specialist Suring School Libraries draus at suring.k12.wi.us
**suring
"It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." Sherlock Holmes - A Scandal in Bohemia.
Received on Fri 13 Oct 2006 12:24:57 PM CDT