People First Language

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Does anyone else absolutely hate people first language???! !! I hate it so much. Any time someone says that I have Autism, I'm like "NO!! I'm Autistic, not I have Autism". Autism does control everything you do, correct? Or at least that's how I feel.

What does people first language mean??
I don't think autism controls everything, that phrase made me imagine autism as some kind of demon making you think the way you don't want to or behave in a way you don't want to xD

I very strongly, deeply and passionately don't give a damn about this issue.

I can see a bit of merit in both sides, but think each uses bogus and largely irrelevant and uninteresting arguments to make out the other side as terrible in some way. When people get really heated about this, it usually seems more about group identity than anything else. Blech.

[quote="lauriefrance"]Does anyone else absolutely hate people first language???! ! ! I hate it so much. Any time someone says that I have Autism, I'm like "NO!! I'm Autistic, not I have Autism". Autism does control everything you do, correct? Or at least that's how I feel.[/quote]

I prefer person first language because it communicates to others that you are a person first and foremost, not some sort of autistic stereotype first and foremost.

It's the practice of putting the person before the disability.

For instance, saying that a person is Autistic is hurtful in the sense that it defines the person by the disorder, which is wrong because defining people by their disorders is the same as defining people by the color of their skin -- it is bigotry, plain and simple.

A "People First" form would be to say that the person has Autism, or has a disorder on the Autistic spectrum.

So which is more correct: "I have the flu" or "I am fluic"?

The answer should be obvious.

Or the conversation might go like this:

"I am a person of wide experience. I have travelled the world and the seven seas. I served my country and built a career. I also happen to have autism."

"Oh! So: Kinda like rainman, huh? Can you do any tricks like multiply big numbers and stuff?"

Because people care.

Ok thanks for clarifying it for me , I think using first language would seem better and nicer because if I said I define myself as autistic rather than someone who has autism it sounds a little like racism.

I guess I prefer identity first, but I don't really care. The only situation that it would really bother me in is if I was using, or suggested someone else use, identity first language to refer to myself and they insisted that I was wrong for doing so and I should actually be using people first.

I prefer identity-first, but it's not a big deal. The idea behind person-first seems silly to me. It's not "autistic person" because of a plot to keep disabled people down, that's just where adjectives go in English. I also don't think autism is something so horrific that I need to use longer, awkward phrasing to distance myself from it.

That's very annoying.

As for me, yes I can see a point in using peoples first language, but on the other hand, we have so many other situations where we don't use it and don't think it's a problem.

For just because you say you "are" X or Y, it doesn't mean it's the one and only definition of who or what you are. You can't say it in one word or sentence anyway.

Eg. if you say: I am a journalist, or I am the daughter of NN, or I am happy, or I am tired... noone takes offence of that, or say that you then only define yourself by your job, your parents, or your mood.

Or else we could say as well: If I say I have autism, it might sound like it's the only thing I have... but we don't say that.

(BTW in the beginning I thought it was a poll about which mother tongue people had, haha.)

I had to look up the meaning on wiki - which admittedly has a good article with pro and con arguments.

People-first language is a type of linguistic prescription in English, aiming to avoid perceived and subconscious dehumanization when discussing people with disabilities, as such forming an aspect of disability etiquette.

The basic idea is to impose a sentence structure that names the person first and the condition second, for example "people with disabilities" rather than "disabled people" or "disabled", in order to emphasize that "they are people first". Because English syntax normally places adjectives before nouns, it becomes necessary to insert relative clauses, replacing, e.g., "asthmatic person" with "a person who has asthma." Furthermore, the use of to be is deprecated in favor of using to have.

The speaker is thus expected to internalize the idea of a disability as a secondary attribute, not a characteristic of a person's identity. Critics of this rationale point out that separating the "person" from the "trait" implies that the trait is inherently bad or "less than", and thus dehumanizes people with disabilities.

The term people-first language first appears in 1988 as recommended by advocacy groups in the United States.[1] The usage has been widely adopted by speech-language pathologists and researchers, with 'person who stutters' (PWS) replacing 'stutterer'.[2]

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is the basis for ideologically motivated linguistic prescriptivism. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis states that language use significantly shapes perceptions of the world and forms ideological preconceptions. Strong versions of this linguistic relativity were popular during the 1960s and 1970s, reflected in practices such as cognitive therapy and neuro-linguistic programming.

In the case of people-first language, preconceptions judged to be negative allegedly arise from placing the name of the condition before the term "person" or "people". Proponents of people-first language argue that this places an undue focus on the condition which distracts from the humanity of the members of the community of people with the condition.

Criticism

Critics have objected that people-first language is awkward, repetitive and makes for tiresome writing and reading. C. Edwin Vaughan, a sociologist and longtime activist for the blind, argues that since "in common usage positive pronouns usually precede nouns", "the awkwardness of the preferred language focuses on the disability in a new and potentially negative way". Thus, according to Vaughan, it only serves to "focus on disability in an ungainly new way" and "calls attention to a person as having some type of 'marred identity'" in terms of Erving Goffman's theory of identity.[7]

The National Federation of the Blind adopted a resolution in 1993 condemning politically correct language. The resolution dismissed the notion that "the word 'person' must invariably precede the word 'blind' to emphasize the fact that a blind person is first and foremost a person" as "totally unacceptable and pernicious" and resulting in the exact opposite of its purported aim, since "it is overly defensive, implies shame instead of true equality, and portrays the blind as touchy and belligerent".[8]

In Deaf culture, person-first language has long been rejected. Instead, Deaf culture uses Deaf-first language since being culturally deaf is a source of positive identity and pride.[9] Correct terms to use for this group would be "Deaf person" or "hard of hearing person".[10] The phrase "hearing impaired" is not acceptable to most Deaf or hard of hearing people because it emphasizes what they cannot do.[11]

Some autism activists reject person-first language, on the grounds that saying "person with autism" suggests that autism can be separated from the person.[12]

Advocates of the social model of disability also reject person-first language, defining themselves as "disabled people" and "disability" as the discrimination they face as a result of their impairments.[13]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People-first_language

$+ \infty$

This.

Literally couldn't care less whether people say "I have autism" or "I am autistic". It doesn't make a single, solitary iota of difference to my life.



Fluic isn't even a word which exists, so of course the latter doesn't make sense.

Being cold is an even more temporary state of affairs than having the flu yet that doesn't stop people from saying "I am cold". Obviously they've made a big linguistical error. In future, they should probably say something like, "I have an uncomfortable sensation of coldness on my skin", so that nobody can dehumanize them by defining them as a person who is cold instead of as a person who has the capacity to feel a wide range of temperatures.

Spot on.

I've never heard any complaints about the use of the terms "neurotypical people" or "typically-developing children". Why? I think the insinuation is that being an autistic person is something to be ashamed of, and should be minimized as a descriptor. I am an autistic person and I'm not ashamed of it. Identity-first language is my preference, but I respect others on the spectrum who prefer person-first. Call people what they want to be called.

I say both on the forums. Sometimes I say I'm autistic and sometimes I say I have autism. I never really saw much of a difference between the two ways of saying it. But like a forum friend of mine has cerebral palsy. So he says "I have cerebral palsy", not "I am cerebral palsy"....But I also have a forum friend who has epilepsy. She either says "I have epilepsy" or "I'm epileptic". Either way she says it, I understand what she means.

Maybe it's just the wording. Like she wouldn't say "I am epilep-sy". But she does say "I'm epilep-tic". I wouldn't say "I'm autis-m" but I do say "I'm autis-tic". The "tic" in both seems to make the difference.