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When I was growing up, my mother taught me that the phrase mentally retarded was inappropriate and developmentally delayed was preferable. To this day I still use the latter phrase when I’m around her, because I know it’s her preference - even though, in many cases, the person is not delayed…they’re not going to develop additional cognitive skills, ever. Today, however, I learned that the federal government’s official term is mental retardation, and that’s what is used by equal employment offices. I found this out when someone wanted to use the phrase intelligence-challenged, which to me sounds more offensive than any of the other terms! (He may have meant intellectually challenged, but that’s not much better.)
Being politically correct isn’t always a good thing. Many people use the phrase hearing-impaired, but most of the people who say that are hearing people. In fact, the term is considered offensive within the Deaf community, whose members don’t view themselves as impaired! There are all kinds of examples of PC-ness taken to the extreme. Shouldn’t we just say what we mean? “Short” is not a derisive term, it means “having little height; not tall.” You don’t have to say “height-challenged” for somebody who is short, you can call them short. But perhaps PC terminology is just an effort to make everybody feel special. “It’s okay to be height-challenged, because now you can overcome that challenge!” Excuse me? How, exactly, is a short adult supposed to grow taller? Isn’t that what’s implied by the phrase “height-challenged?”
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What do you call someone who is hard of hearing, but not deaf, just ‘hard of hearing’? Just a simple question.
Terms like “visually impaired” or “hearing impaired” aren’t intended as slights to the Blind or the Deaf. They’re supposed to be inclusive. To be visually impaired doesn’t mean a person must be completely blind, and to be hearing impaired doesn’t mean a person must be completely deaf.
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It is useful to be able to create a category like “people who are visually impaired” for reasons that have nothing to do with PC. For example, website design must take into account people who are visually impaired if you want them to be able to take advantage of the information on those pages. That means a lot more than just allowing access to speaking browsers that are used by people who are completely blind.
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All that having been said, I’ll add these two bits of food for thought: First, the so-called PC movement is the only reason why anyone is even paying attention to meeting the needs of people who not so very long ago were shuffled aside as useless. Second, while much silliness has been blamed on political correctness, quite a lot more evil has been perpetrated in the name of callous convenience.