Know better, do better, be radder

I try not to judge. Truly. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve used a word I now regret, I’d buy a giant roll of sticky tape to cover my mouth. And I’m not just talking about ‘moist’, ‘nourishing’, ‘succulent’, ‘encrusted’ or ‘panties’.

Lizzo did it first, but she apologised and fixed it. Beyoncé did it next. That was harder to understand: you couldn’t say she didn’t realise. By that time, everyone had seen the Lizzo shizzo go down.

I’m talking about using the word ‘spaz’.

There are two types of defenders. The first type? Someone says ‘spaz’ is funny - only snowflakes disagree.

A ‘debate’ follows. Someone else replies, it hurts. They’re disabled themselves, or they’re raising a disabled kid. Another lone voice pops up. They say, well, I’m disabled and I can take a joke! They get a bunch of likes.

The joke-crackers frustrate me, but it’s this last voice that devastates me. Again, I try not to judge. I just know we live in a world where if you can’t punch, you have to learn to roll with the punches. Or, in a kind of self-preservation, you roll before the punch even connects.

Now to the second type of defenders. They’re desperate to explain that ‘spaz’ doesn’t even mean disability these days. It means a bunch of things. It all depends on your context and your culture.

I call bullshit - elaborate bullshit - on this. ‘Spaz’ comes from only one place. It means ‘spasticity’ or ‘spastic’. Its origins, without a trace of a doubt, are in the mockery of disabled people. And that’s the kicker.

Sure, we use ‘spaz’ these days to mean a bunch of things. Fool, loser, comic relief. But that’s because we generalised a disability slur to mean everything that is lesser. Disability became a shorthand for our cultural contempt - a denigration so normal we don’t even notice. That doesn’t show that ‘spaz’ no longer mocks disability. In the deepest, most shameful of ways, it proves exactly the opposite.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Way better to listen to disabled people. But we don’t. We talk over them, telling them they don’t get the joke, or feeling churlish when they refuse to be the punchline. Again, if the cultural contempt isn’t obvious enough, I don’t know what to tell ya.

I have a thin claim to the moral high ground. Like I said, I’ve used words I regret. Probably you have too. We said these words, and there are many of them, because they were easy, were lazy.

‘Sorry’ is just one word: only one. Somehow, to say it is harder - yet it always feels better when you do.

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