There are many words in today’s modern language that we use for insults. Some of these we know that we should not use because they can be hurtful to certain groups of people, such as the “r word” or gay. There are many words out there that most of us use probably on a regular basis that we might not think much of. The word I chose for this blog is dumb. Dumb is defined as “lacking the human power of speech”.[1] In other words, this refers to a person who cannot speak most likely because of deafness.
However the connotations today for the word “dumb” are very different. We use it today to describe something or someone as stupid or not intelligent. We use this word to describe a lot of things. If someone is acting in a certain way we might call them dumb. There are many different emotions that we can express when saying this word. We could be joking around because they are acting silly, we could say it because we are mad at that person, because we are frustrated, and so on. The connotations for this word are much different then when it was describing someone who could not speak due to being deaf.
The community that is impacted by this word being an insult is the deaf community. This word is still being used against the same group that it always was, the deaf, but it is now being used in a completely different meaning. It was once used only to describe that a person could not speak due to deafness, but now it is being used as an insult because they are deaf! This community is being thought of as unintelligent (dumb) because of the simple fact that they cannot hear, therefore they use sign language. How could this be possible that every deaf person is unintelligent? That is like saying that every non deaf person is intelligent. It simply is not true.
Members of the deaf community are asking that they not be referred to as dumb anymore. For the obvious reason, they are not “dumb”. In one of the blogs I found about the deaf community relating to the word dumb, I found a video that I thought spoke well to this issue Deaf Not Dumb. The individuals in this video are simply asking to not automatically act like they are not intelligent just because they cannot hear what others are saying. They just want to be treated with the same respect that those who can hear, and therefore speak get. When I first watched this, I could not believe that so many people think that because someone uses a different form of communication they are automatically unintelligent. It amazes me how ignorant people really are that they don’t think that what they say hurts people. I do not think that I have ever come across a deaf person and thought that they were not smart just because they were using their hands to speak. It is ridiculous. Bitch magazine
This word is not appropriate in only a certain community of people. I think that everyone uses, or has used, this word in their life. They have probably used in many times without even thinking about it. I know I have, quite a bit. I never thought about how it used to be used. I never thought that by calling someone dumb, it would be an insult to the deaf community. I think that there are many more words that are far worse than “dumb”, but after having to write this blog, and think about what the word really means, I will now think twice before I use it to insult someone or something.
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