Words - The Disability Blog Carnival

This is the (day late) January Disability Blog Carnival. Our theme today is words and we have several posts to share.

I originally chose the theme because I am focusing on the word courage this year. I've been meaning to write a longer post about the reasons behind that decision but most of my blog time lately has been taken up by words of a different sort - my 100 days of writing project.

I've also been wondering about the meaning of wheelchair user. I've been thinking that maybe there needs to be a different term. But I've yet to come up with one!

Ok that's enough about me. Here's some other people's contributions.

First up we have Becky who is someone I think should blog more often. Her post is Words words words - they matter.. She writes:

Words, though, aren’t without their connotations and their price, in terms of my mood, depending on the situation.

The Goldfish is the next participant with mad bad dangerous to say as she wrote in the email she sent me:

It's about the words we use around mental illness and asks how we can
separate these from the words we use around outlandish behaviour which
may have nothing to do with mental health.

As someone who has some mental health problems and uses the username CrazyWriteNow in some places it really made me think.

Loathing words is by Dave Hingsburger of Rolling Around In My Head. He addresses several common disability words and basically calls bullshit on them.

Shiloh has done something a little bit different in her post about hope. She's taken a common end of year meme and used it and her word of the year - hope - to look forward to the year ahead. I found it quite an intriguing idea but I think I'll stick to my end of year tradition.

In what I think is the first vlog I've included in my editions of the disability blog carnival we have this very heartfelt video Acceptance by Elaine, who tweets as @raggydoll79. It made me want to gather her up and give her a big hug.

Girl With The Cane sent me a link to an older post of hers. Politically Correct. It's about the power of words and it's brilliant.

As she writes:

If you really believe that words are just words, put your money where your mouth is. No agenda of politically correct language…the respect of finding out someone’s personal preference…and going by it.

Gimp Tude is a new blog to me. Having just gone back to read awesome I think it might become a regular read.


This year I’m going to be awesome. Able-bodies hold your pity please. Hold your stories of brave and inspiring. I’m just going to be more awesome than I’ve ever been. So deal with it.


Gimp, by the way, is the one disability positive word that makes me uncomfortable. I think it's because it's a very American word so I don't hear it very often and also because I first heard it about 9 years ago before I began to know about reclaiming words etc.

That's all folks! Dave Hingsburger is up next.