Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

ALL THE OTHER children at my school are stupid. Except I’m not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are. I’m meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding Relativity is difficult, and also everyone has special needs, like Father who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him getting fat, or Mrs Peters who wears a beige-coloured hearing aid, or Siobhan who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs.

But Siobhan said we have to use those words because people used to call children like the children at school spaz and crip and mong which were nasty words. But that is stupid too because sometimes the children from the school down the road see us in the street when we’re getting off the bus and they shout, ‘Special Needs! Special Needs!’ But I don’t take any notice because I don’t listen to what other people say and only sticks and stones can break my bones.

(Christopher John Francis Boone (narrator), p 43)

 

This is exactly why I tend to mentally wince when I hear people (who often don't even belong to the particular targeted minority) claim that such-and-such word should never be said, because it's offensive, as it were, by definition. I have friends who use words like faggot or poofter and it's all right because they don't mean it nastily; there are many more people who would never dream of using these expressions, yet are latent homophobes for all that. (Some of them are not even latent, except perhaps to themselves.)

I remember a real-life example similar to the one in the quote: years ago, where I lived the word 'Gipsy' was a perfectly neutral expression; if one wanted to be offensive, there were many other words to choose from. But as the majority population on the whole hated the Gipsies and only talked about them disparagingly, some activists (many of them 'white') decided that 'Gipsy' was an offensive word in itself and decent folk must use 'Roma' instead. The result? Ten years later most people said 'Roma' ... and most said it with a sneer and as much, if not more, hate.