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Mostly this is done by some third person observer or where the person with the disability is the speaker, the disability is emphasised, eg. 'said the blind man'. No other physical or social descriptor appears with such frequency.

Perhaps not unexpectedly such stand-in appellations are most commonly applied to villains. They were quite commonplace during the heyday of the pulp magazines where the disability was incorporated into their names: 'One Eyed Joe', 'Scarface Kelly'. (This is a tradition enshrined in the Dick Tracy comic strips.) It is also a tradition that continues, though with more subtlety. Today we may no longer have 'Clubfoot the Avenger', a mad German master criminal who crossed swords for twenty-five years with the British Secret Service (Williams 1918, 1923, 1924, 1928, 1932, 1936, 1944), but we do have 'The Deaf Man', the oft recurring thorn in the side of Ed McBain's long running (over thirty years) 87th Precinct series (1968, 1973, 1985). All such instances cannot help but reinforce an association between disability, badness, and abnormality (Conrad and Schneider 1980).

A very old joke illustrates the further pervasiveness of such labelling:

"A man is changing a flat tire outside a mental hospital when the bolts from his wheel roll down a nearby sewer. Distraught, he is confronted by a patient watching him who suggests, 'Why don't you take one bolt off each of the other wheels, and place it on the spare?' Surprised when it works, the driver says, 'How come you of all people would think of that?' Replies the patient, 'I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid.'"

This anecdote demonstrates the flaw in thinking that a person who is mad is therefore stupid or incapable of being insightful about everything. As the social psychological literature has long noted, this is how stigma comes about: from a process of generalising from a single experience, people are treated categorically rather than individually and in the process, devalued (Ainlay, Becker, Coleman 1986; Jones et al. 1984; Katz 1981). As Longmore so eloquently concludes, a 'spoiling process' (Goffman 1963) results whereby 'they obscure all other characteristics behind that one and swallow up the social identity of the individual within the restrictive category'(Longmore 1985, p. 419). Peters puts it most concretely: 'The label that's used to describe us is often far more important in shaping our view of ourselves -- and the way others view us -- than whether we sign, use a cane, sit in a wheelchair, or use a communication board' (1986a, p. 25).

While many have offered vocabulary suggestions to combat the abovenamed connotations and pervasiveness, few have analytically delineated what is at stake in such name changes (Kriegel 1969, 1981; Longmore 1985). The most provocative and historically rooted analysis is an unpublished paper by Phillips (1986). There she delineates four distinct strategies which underly the renaming. While she carefully notes that further investigation may change or expand her categorisation, the very idea of her schema and the historical data describing the genesis of each 'recoding' remain timely.

'Cripple' and 'handicapped', either as nouns or adjectives, she sees as primarily 'names of acquiescence and accommodation', reflecting an acceptance of society's oppressive institutions. Terms such as 'physically challenged' reflect a 'try harder ideology'. By making 'the challenge' such a personal one, they also run the risk of fostering a 'blaming the victim' stance (Ryan 1970). Such a term, as well as ones like the Association for Community Living', 'physically different', 'physically inconvenienced', may not only be so euphemistic as to confound anyone as to who is being referred as well as contribute too strongly to the denial of existing realities (Chaffee 1987). The two remaining strategies represent a more activistic philosophy. 'Handicapper' and 'differently-abled' are 'names of reaction and reflection' where the purpose of the creators is in emphasising 'the can-do' aspects of having a disability.

The former interestingly enough draws sustenance from dictionary usage (something which I will do in subsequent pages of this paper) whereas 'handicapper' is defined as someone who determines or assigns handicaps usually in athletic contexts.

To the group of Michigan advocates who coined the term (Gentile and Taylor 1976), a 'handicapper' is an individual who determines the degree to and manner in which one's own definable physical or mental characteristics might direct one's life activities. Most angry of all, says Phillips, are 'names of renegotiation and inversion' where it is the context that sets the meaning. Perhaps the best known examples are when political activities in the privacy of their own circles talk dirty, referring to themselves as 'blinks', 'gimps', or telling 'crip' jokes and expounding on the intricacies of 'crip' time. Far more controversial, however, is when in public people proclaim such terms as a matter of pride. Thus, recently many have written about the positive aspects of 'being deaf' (Disability Rag 1986; Innerst 1986) or even more dramatically in being a 'cripple' (Milan 1984). Kriegel (1969, 1981) says that 'cripple' describes 'an essential reality', a way of keeping what needs to be dealt with socially and politically in full view. Nancy Mairs, a prize-winning poet who has multiple sclerosis, clearly agrees; and in the opening remarks of her essay, 'On Being a Cripple', states it most vividly: