The C-Slur

[ID: A speech bubble on a purple background/ End ID]

 I've been seeing a lot of people using the world "cripple" lately in very casual ways. It's almost never meant negativity, but it shows just how little people listen to the disabled community. Cripple or crippled is not just a fancy way of saying "badly injured". it's not an adjective you should be using just to spice up your sentence because you used "injured" or "disabled" too many times in that paragraph, or because you feel like it gives your writing some extra "oomph".
Cripple is a slur. Specifically, it's a slur for the physically disabled community, and something we've been begging people to move away from using for decades now.

Cripple, for a long time, was used as an umbrella term for physically disabled people, but since at least the 1970's (50 years), we as a community have been pushing back against it. I don't use the term slur here lightly either. cripple is a term with centuries of abuse behind it, centuries of being used to justify physically disabled people being treated as less-than, centuries of demonetisation, mistreatment, ostracisation, and murder.

The word comes from the old english word crēopel, which roughly meant to "creep" - as in, to move slowly and in unsettling ways. At some point, crēopel started to also be used to refer to someone who creeped, and eventually was used in similar ways to the modern word "creep" - as in a person that causes a feeling of discomfort or fear, or someone who was unpleasant. It later became the word crypel - which was the first time (that I was able to find) that it was used specifically for disabled people, and later became cripple. While the word wasn't really used in a particularly hateful way, it was still based off the word for "creep" and shared a route with creepy and other words that became derogatory/insults in modern English. It also carried the social view of disability in England and Europe at the time, which as a general whole, was extremely negative. England in particular was very cruel to disabled people, viewing them, in many ways, as a punishment from god or a result of the person or their parent as dealing with the devil.

These views on disability carried on for centuries. A cursory glance at European history (as well as the history of post-colonial European colonies like The USA, Australia and Canada) will show you that "cripples" were not looked upon favourably for the most part. Many cultures would leave disabled babies in the woods or on mountains to die, and giving birth to a disabled child could get you and your baby executed for witchcraft. Some cultures saw them as curses or bad omens, shunning them at best or exiling them at worst. In other places, becoming disabled through war or injury was seen as dishonourable and a sign you just weren't very good at your job as a warrior or whatever you were, becoming disabled due to illness was a sign you were weak-willed or not devoted enough to your faith, Even becoming disabled in old age was seen as "outliving your usefulness" to some, and seen as shameful and selfish by some.

As time went on, the negative association with disability and all it's social connotations of the time stuck, including the idea that "cripples" were inherently weaker or worse-off, which is how, in the modern day, you end up with "cripple" being used as a verb even when not referring to a living thing - e.g. it crippled their defences. It's comparing whatever is being "crippled" to the weakening of the human body associated with physical disability.

These associations didn't stop in what we would consider "ancient history" either. The film "The greatest Showman" was based on a real story, but unlike the musical, the real P. T. Barnum (and many others in the circus and "freak-show" industry ) horribly mistreated their performers, knowing that "the freaks" couldn't get any other jobs due to stigma. Some disabled people, such as little people and those with "interesting deformities" were bought and kept as pets by nobility, In many places, disabled people were legally forbidden from entering the workforce, even if they were physically able to do the job, often only allowed to do work that would not be seen by the public. In many American cities, visibly disabled people were not even legally allowed out in public due to a series of laws coined "the ugly laws" - some of which remained in place all the way until the 1970's.

The term "cripple" carries all this history (and much, much more), which is why many disabled people want to move away from it, both from it being used to refer to us, and in the more general sense.

There are some people within the physical disability community, though, myself included, who are reclaiming the term, that's where movements like cripplepunk (also known as crip-punk or C-punk) come from. I love the cripplepunk movement and everything it stands for: being unapologetic about our disabilities and not changing ourselves for the comfort or convenience of able-bodied folks. But those of us who use it in that context understand the history of the word, we know how it was used to hurt us, and we understand that not everyone in the physically disabled community is comfortable with the use of the word, especially those who were around when someone being labelled as "crippled" was seen as a valid reason to treat them as less than human. We understand the impact of the word, but most non-disabled and able-bodied people don't, which is why we have been asking people not to use it if you aren't in the community. Because we simply can't know if every non-disabled person has done that research and has that understanding, or if they're just using it becuase it sounds cool.

And for able-bodied authors specifically, even if your character is physically disabled, I'd still recommend avoiding it unless you're prepared to do a LOT of sensitivity readings from multiple sensitivity readers. I've been physically disabled since I was 1 year old, I learned to walk for the first time in prosthetics and have been using a wheelchair since I was in school, I have no memory of life as an able-bodied person, and I am part of the group reclaiming it, and even I don't feel comfortable using the word "cripple" in my work.
It's a loaded word, with a lot of implications and a LOT of very dark, and for some people, very recent history. It's not a sentence enhancer to just throw in willy-nilly. Please.