Can't resist: what Howard is describing sounds just like the lifecycle of
a euphemism. Something unpleasant needs to be talked about, we invent a
word to talk about it (like toilet), it becomes the scapegoat for some
ideology (maybe class associations?) that gets thrown out (people hope)
with the euphemism, which has too clearly become associated with that
unpleasant thing and thereby becomes dysphemistic, and then a new
euphemism gets substituted (like lavatory). That, in turn,... and so on,
because unpleasant things don't go away with changes of euphemism.
Imagine: at one point the word "retarded" was the neutral scientific term,
now it is clearly dysphemistic, and we have a wide array of euphemisms,
actively creating more.
This, of course, is a little parenthetical remark to what Phil (in a short
version of a long story he didn't have time for :) ) and Andy have
already so clearly laid out. Neat, gentlemen; I hadn't thought of the
ideology of those words in quite that way. I had always thought of client
and customer as in the semantic domain of service relationships: clients
are people with whom one has a supply-of-service relationship and
customers are people with whom one has a supply-of-goods relationship.
Clearly there is more to it than that, and client can participate in other
contrast pairs. Hmm.
--Alena
On Fri, 7 Sep 2001 HowHtJ@aol.com wrote:
> Renee;
> In my understanding, the shift from a medical model of disability (and
> patients) to a psychosocial rehabilitation model (and clients) was followed
> with a critique by people like Wolf Wolfensberger and Vic Frankelstein and a
> move to a socio-political model of disability. Both prior movements were
> seen as equating difference as deficient.
>
> I find it difficult to talk to other human service workers without using the
> term clients, but this difficulty in classifying people is exactly what the
> model seeks to accomplish as well as resisting the power of human service in
> a Foucaultian sense. An agency I worked for banned the word client for the
> words "person we serve". It used "people first" language (i.e., a person
> with a disabilities, not a disabled person) and emphasized our role as
> service providers. However, without questioning the underlying power
> structures, the term "person served" became common which was effectively the
> same as client.
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Oct 10 2001 - 15:49:11 PDT