How should persons with special needs be treated, the kind of language one should use when talking about them, as well as the kind of language that is not acceptable?

Question

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

(Excerpt)

By Mark Haddon (England)

 I find people confusing.

This is for two main reasons.

The first main reason is that people do a lot of talking without using any words. Siobhan says that if you raise one eyebrow it can mean lots of different things.

Siobhan also says that if you close your mouth and breathe out loudly through your nose, it can mean that you are relaxed, or that you are bored, or that you are angry, and it all depends on how much air comes out of your nose and how fast and what shape your mouth is when you do it and how you are sitting and what you said just before and hundreds of other things which are too complicated to work out in a few seconds.

The second main reason is that people often talk using metaphors. These are examples of metaphors:

I laughed socks off.

He was the apple of her eye.

They had a skeleton in the cupboard. We had a real pig of a day.

The dog was stone dead.

The word metaphor means carrying something from one place to another, and it comes from the Greekwords μετά (which means from one place to another) and φέρω (which means to carry), and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that isn’t. This means that the word metaphor is a metaphor.

I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining an apple in someone’s eye doesn’t have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.

My name is a metaphor. It means carrying Christ and it comes from the

Greek words Χριστός (which means Jesus Christ) and φέρειν and it was the name given to St. Christopher because he carried Jesus Christ across river.

This makes you wonder what he was called before he carried Christ across the river. But he wasn’t called anything because this is an apocryphal story, which means that it is a lie, too.

Mother used to say that it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me.

After reading the literary pieces closely, try to reflect on what the texts say and come up with your own evaluation or reaction through the questions below. 

2. 

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

(Excerpt)

By Mark Haddon (England)

Persons with Asperger’s Syndrome or Autism and persons with disabilities, in general, are often discriminated from members of society may it be in the workplace or in school, they are being bullied and misunderstood. According to Buenaobra (2011), for a long time, Filipinos with disabilities have suffered from discrimination. Their economic, social, and political rights have not been recognized and their access to educational opportunities and government services has been limited. there are still significant barriers that keep them from fully participating in society, including the stigma surrounding a disability and society’s poor understanding of the abilities and aspirations of the disabled people. Often, they face a life that is segregated and debased, and many live in isolation and insecurity

How should persons with special needs be treated, the kind of language one should use when talking about them, as well as the kind of language that is not acceptable? Elaborate using practical scenarios.

Answer 1

I did respond to your question earlier, but I see now that you have added the first text excerpt. Let's work through how you can incorporate it into your answer.

The first text encourages the reader to consider how we use body and spoken language to describe people and things or express ideas and emotions. Body language, just like certain ways of speaking, can have many different meanings depending on many different variables. The narrator expresses confusion and frustration over people who say things without using words because this kind of communication can be open to so many interpretations.

Try asking yourself: What does the narrator find similarly frustrating about people who communicate through body language and people who use metaphors to communicate in speech? Think about the frustration the narrator expresses over their own name being a metaphor that they believe is based on a lie. The label "Christ-bearer" was attached to St. Christopher only after he bore the cross of carrying Jesus, but the narrator doesn't believe St. Christopher did any such thing in the first place. They don't like that their name is predicated on what they believe to be a lie. Most importantly, the narrator doesn't identify themselves with either the literal or figurative meaning attached to their name

Following the second text excerpt, we can say that the label of "being disabled" transcends more common, baseline personal identifications such as nationality, economic class, political alignment, etc that all members of a society share. Because of this label, people with disabilities are often kept outside of society and their status of "being disabled" becomes a stigma. It therefore seems reasonable to say that people with disabilities have less in common with people without disabilities than people without disabilities have with each other, but still more in common with other people with disabilities. A Filipino quadriplegic, for example, might have more in common with a non-Filipino person with autism than they might with a Filipino who does not identify as disabled.

So, when thinking about how we should talk about people with disabilities, it would probably be helpful to consider that people with disabilities already face some degree of inherent alienation from the rest of society. The hypothetical quadriplegic Filipino and the hypothetical non-Filipino person with autism could both have the experience of being isolated from their respective societies. One way in which this isolation could manifest is through the use of language. Think about how we often talk about disabled people in our own society: Are we direct, or roundabout? Is it something you think people generally would say is "comfortable" for them to talk about, regardless of their status as abled or disabled?

Try combining and answering these two questions, one posed by each excerpt, to create your thesis statement:

1. What does the narrator find similarly frustrating about people who communicate through body language and people who use metaphors to communicate in speech?
2. Drawing from the text and from practical examples, how we should talk about people with disabilities? How should we not talk about people with disabilities?

You should refer to the text for examples that can strengthen your statement as often as you can, but remember that the prompt also asks you to elaborate using practical scenarios that you will need to independently provide.

As an example of how you could do that, let's circle all the way back to the end of the first excerpt. The narrator is frustrated that the meaning of their name has already been decided for them based on a story they believe to be a lie. The power to identify with their own name has been taken out of their hands. How does this relate to how disabilities are defined? It might be useful to think about who decides how disability labels are defined - do you think disabled people get to define their own labels any more or less than anyone gets to define what their names mean? What is the narrator suggesting about the degree of identification associated with "being disabled" - is it similar to how strongly they think other people identify with their own names?