i do not believe these words should be abandoned!
my intent is to point out and critique society’s weaponization of words, not the words themselves.
also! this is a descriptive post, not perscriptive
what that means is just that i want ppl to be aware that this pattern has happened in the past and of course the forces behind those happenings haven’t just disappeared. i think pride in being ND and the fact that “neurodiverse” is a word that is created by its own community are powerful reasons to doubt that the word will have the same fate. perhaps i would call this a “call to awareness” post rather than a call to action.
(making this disclaimer because a couple people are violently adamant that i am just trying to make an argument saying all these words are the same and predicting the future, which, sorry you got that impression it’s not true. but now you know!)
Absolutely. All of the terms in the post are a bit different from one another. All came from varying origins and backgrounds and have different histories of how they came to be in my post.
What they share is a pattern of similarities. They all are originally polite descriptive words that became demeaning.
The first four terms became associated with disabilities through the medical field. The first two terms were categories on the IQ-Scale (idiot is the one that comes before imbecile in that scale, btb). The third is a shortening of a medical term conflated with another (spasticity and clonus) and the fourth is another psychological term referring to similar things as the first two.
Those were originally meant to be clinical but have been abused by those people, they also were created from outside the community (special needs most likely too, as it is a euphemism). I am unsure about “Acoustic”, that might be embracing of a meme, unless it was used as a euphemism for autism by non-autistic people.
Neurodivergent is different, this is a term coined by a part of the community. I am not sure whether the term endonym is accurate here but it is similar in nature.
Absolutely, no lie detected.
My concern is that I am seeing even neurodivergent beginning to being used against the community that created it. Following the same old patterns. My hope is that by calling it out, that damage and appropriation can be mitigated.