Can we ban negative words: or does that make the problem much worse?

Crazy, tone-deaf, and special: the negativity cycle

Authors Note: Ableist language is used throughout this piece to illustrate the point, add context, and avoid confusion. I do not support using slurs to mock or distress someone in any context.

When I was about nine or ten, we had an assembly on disabled children. This, rather ham-fistedly, was because a little girl with severe developmental disabilities was joining our year. Disabilities were not bad things, we were told, by our very not disabled headmistress. They just make us different! We are all different, after all. So we shouldn’t say someone is intellectually disabled. We should say they are “special”. It took about a year, if less than that, for the word ‘special’ to become an insult, meaning stupid. It was now a deliberate insult to call a classmate ‘special’, and one that could ironically land a student with a detention. Despite the rebrand, we all understood that ‘being special’ was bad. I’m not saying any of this was okay, but it is what happened.

And this has happened many, many times to language: idiot became retarded, retarded became slow, slow became mentally disabled, mentally disabled became special, and special became differently abled by the time I was fourteen. The next word unfortunately inherits all the negativity and slur value of the one before it. This is the ‘ungood fallacy’: when society understands a trait or concept to be…