Mind your language
`CHILDREN are already calling each other LDs,' said a spokesman for Men- cap recently. LD stands for Learning Difficulties and it is applied to children deemed to have them as a politically correct alternative for thickoes, as my schoolday contemporaries cruelly put it.
The vogue term of abuse in those days was spastic, a term we would never have heard of if it hadn't been for the propaganda effort of the Spastics Soci- ety. They are now trying to change their name because of its 'negative connota- tions', and have already in the tele- phone book added the rider, 'for people with cerebral palsy'. At least this has a nice biblical echo of 'the man sick of the palsy'.
An example of a flop in name-chang- ing that was intended to achieve a more positive image has been the Marriage Guidance Council, which adopted the title Relate. Not surprisingly, few peo- ple knew what an organisation with such a name was meant to do.
Oh, and by the way, as I promised last week to mention, the country some peo- ple have oddly chosen to call Myanmar is Burma.
Dot Wordsworth
Previous page
