Owning The C Word

It crossed my mind that perhaps I ought to discuss why I use the word "cripple" to such excess. I am sure there are people who consider it unseemly, gauche, or just plain weird.

Well, it took me a long time to come to terms with cripple. I used to hate it ad extremum -- when I was a kid and someone referred to me as crippled, I always developed an urge to kneecap that person and then stand over him or her yelling, Who's crippled now? Huh? Now who's the cripple, stupid face? (I have never been good at angry insults. I'm the kind of person who thinks of a priceless retort 2 hours after the argument has been resolved.)

But then I grew up, and in recent years I have learned that there is a certain amount of empowerment to be found in claiming for yourself those words that are so often pejorative: cripple, retard, dyke, nigger, cracker, faggot, fairy ... by taking the words back from the mouths of the ignorant and wearing them like a badge of honor, by making them yours, you can remove their power to hurt you. 

I must sound like a therapist or a self-help guru. For the record, I never bought in to that, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." crap. Words do hurt. I spent enough hours crying in school bathrooms as a kid to know that words are some of the most hurtful things out there. Language is powerful; it's supposed to be. How else would we communicate, if words -- spoken, or written, or signed -- had no power? Nonverbal cues can only go so far. As a species, we have evolved past the point of easily reading minute gestures and expressions and have come to depend on words; whether this is a good or a bad thing is an argument for another day, but it does leave us with the fact that words carry a great deal of power -- and just like any other powerful thing, a word can be made into a weapon.

So think of my tendency to bandy about "cripple," then, as a way of impudently striding up to the weapons made of words and rendering them useless. I steal the arrows from the bows and dull the heads of all the hatchets; I take the bullets from the guns and replace them with blanks. "Cripple" cannot harm me if I am armored with it.

This is not to say that a word cannot worm its way in -- that happens sometimes. I harbor an intense and inexpressible hatred for "invalid" when used as a noun and applied to a person: in-valid, as in "not valid." I cannot bring myself to use the word to describe who I am, even in peremptory jest. I want to fling that word to the ground and stomp and stomp and stomp on it until it's 20 different kinds of dead. Thankfully it's archaic and I only see it in books, otherwise there might actually be some people laying around minus their kneecaps.

But to go back to the original idea, here: I use "cripple" as a joke. As armor. As a preemptive strike against something that might otherwise hurt. I have an older, unmarried female friend who is reclaiming the word "spinster," and while I don't know her motives there, it seems to empower her as much as reclaiming "cripple" has empowered me. She's having fun collecting spinster things, and I am having fun with my little crippled blog.

That's why you come to a blog called "One Little Cripple," and not something with a sappy, hopeful-sounding title that will uplift you and instill in you teary-eyed admiration for the writer. Because OLC is real. Being a cripple is a gritty, gutsy, not-always-pretty human experience that I, as a cripple, can own, and in owning it, share it with others. My usual medium is humor. That's how I have chosen to share this journey with you: through humor. And since I consider throwing around the c-word like candy at a parade to be humorous, you'll be seeing it a lot.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go play like a crippled Wednesday Addams and recline on my 8,000 spikes.