If you’ve noticed, I don’t like to call
it ableism when cripples freak out verts (which is what I call people who walk
because it’s short for vertical).
It’s not that I don’t believe a lot of
verts are freaked out by cripples. Lord knows they are. But ableism doesn’t
seem like the right word for it to me. It just sounds too gratingly wimpy. I
prefer to call it something like crippophobia because that’s what it is. It’s
fear of cripples.
And the best word I can come up with for that is
crippophobia. Because I looked it up and
I couldn’t find a word for fear of cripples. There are a zillion weird phobias
including fear of balloons and fear of chickens. But there is no word as far as
I can tell for fear of cripples, which means that the people who come up with
names for all the weird phobias must think there’s no such thing, which means
none of them are crippled.
Because when verts are freaked out by
cripples, it’s because they’re scared of us. It’s not the same type of fear
some white people have of black people. They’re not afraid we’re going to move
in next door and try to date their daughters. And they’re not afraid of us the
same way people are afraid of the IRS. We can’t garnish their paychecks.
And it’s not like we’re all contagious.
It’s not like if you’re in the same room with someone with cerebral palsy,
you’ll suddenly become all spastic. If you breathe the same air as a little
person, you won’t shrink.
Maybe people are scared of us for the
same reason they’re scared of spiders—because they think we’re ugly. Most
spiders can’t hurt anybody but they scare the hell out of people because
they’re ugly.
But I think it’s probably more of an
existential fear. The verts who don’t want cripples around them are scared
because we remind them of the endless possibilities of life, and not in a good
way. We remind them that anybody can be or become one of us, which we often
find humorous because being one of us freaks them out way more than it does us.
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Word of the Year 2022
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