Both ends of the political spectrum have somewhat valid reasons for altering the way we speak, particularly when used as an insult that only leads to division and more contradiction. Banning certain words from use is akin to book burning where controversial ideas cannot be expressed in any other terms than the words that are in contention.

From my experience, anyone with spinal cord injury severe enough that a family could not take care of, was sent to a mixed disability home like the county farms and veterans homes in my home state of Wisconsin prior to 1950. Fortunately, I was paralyzed in 1963 when there was enough enlightenment and money in government, to begin assisting people like me to rehabilitate and get me back to what I was doing before my surgical accident--going to college. So fortunate not to be deposited with other throwaways or dependent upon my parents for the rest of my life. College and my hand splint made in the summer of 1964 gave me freedom and independence.

Back then, it was common for people like me to be called crippled (crip), gimp, or handicapped (cap-in-hand). The supposed occupation of those of us who couldn't work or were denied work based on our physical appearance and assumed inabilities. Of course, I gladly let my roommate who had an upstairs apartment do all the cooking, cleaning and other apartment duties for the privilege of helping him pay the rent. I loved it when he would remark, "What's the matter, you crippled or somethin'!" Basically meaning that I was proving to him that my disability wasn't a hindrance to my life. In fact, I often passed for normal until people saw my hands.

A friend of mine in a wheelchair from Ecuador has developed a dictionary of many, many more terms that have been used for describing disabilities of all kinds. It is a long list of very derogatory words used to demean people like me who have muscle spasms and therefore are called "spas" or spastic”. Disabilities that people are born with, some acquired through accident and some acquired through disease. It is fair to say that almost everyone becomes severely disabled before they die. It would be fortunate to be one of the exceptions, dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse. Severe disability before dying can be a real pain in the ass. Using an inappropriate word.

But I am an author and this forum is for authors. We need the full lexicon of all of the words in the ever-growing English language at our disposal without censorship or banning of our work from certain sectors of society. The rating system for writing, movies and television may be okay, but when I was growing up, all the taboo words were easily available without the rating system, and some great works of literature should be available at a much earlier age than they are now. Banning great books like Huckleberry Finn from schools is a very bad thing for society as a whole. It is primarily intolerance. Freedom of speech, granted by the Constitution in the United States should not legalize intolerance, but free citizens from being prevented from speaking their minds. Something that is starting to happen in social media, partly because so much of social media has been politicized rather than open to scholarly discussions or just plain fun.

All that said, I have a pet peeve over two of my constant companions. Dragon for the Mac that I'm using to write this article with some difficulty and a word game on the Publishers Clearinghouse Fake Lottery on the Internet.

Dragon for the Mac is the last of, perhaps, seven or eight systems for dictating to a computer that I tried and even used since about 1993. But I didn't write my first novel by dictation until Power Secretary was bought by IBM and became ViaVoice for around $250 as opposed to Power Secretary's outrageous price of $3000. A price that mostly only doctors and lawyers were able to afford or expense. There was even a version with an extensive medical vocabulary. And another one with a legal vocabulary.

In 2001, I wrote Alone?, my second novel, with ViaVoice by having to pause between each word and then, do a lot of voice or manual correction of wrong words. But it was still much faster and spelling was much more accurate than my typing with one finger I had done from 1974 until 1993 at work and home. Fortunately, I could use my left index finger knuckle to push the shift key often to get capital letters and special symbols. I probably typed about 10 words a minute, very inaccurately without a dictionary. Secretaries corrected my hand-lettered memos so I didn't pay much attention to spelling. I always was a phonetic speller.

Dragon by Nuance was originally developed for the Windows platform used on most PCs. In the early 2000s, they developed Dragon NaturallySpeaking that eliminated having to pause between words while dictating. It was a big improvement that eventually moved over to the Macintosh platform where I picked it up. But in 2016, Apple's continual upgrading of their operating system and introduction of their own dictation system embedded in applications, caused Nuance to no longer support Dragon for the Mac. When I found that the Apple dictation system was way inferior to Dragon, I had no choice but to continue using Dragon for the Mac.

Dragon for the Mac still works on this 13-year-old iMac. I have retained the old operating system without upgrading so that Dragon still works fairly well except confusing "in" with "and", as well as "that" with "had" and a number of other words have similar sound. Word training no longer seems to work very well and the best choice for a sentence I dictated is always the second one requiring me to choose it before continuing on.

On my other iMac, I have everything up to date. And Dragon for the Mac still works somewhat but badly. I can copy text but if I go to paste it in a dialog box on the Internet it crashes the webpage. And doesn't work very well with regular dictation either. So I do most of my dictating on this much older iMac until it fails altogether. But I'm really off subject here.

Dragon for the Mac automatically censors me. I like the word shit, because as we all know, it happens. But, of the five or six alternate words that I could have said to choose, I have never found the correct spelling, S-H-I-T, presented for me to choose. The same goes for other words with a sexual connotation like whore where I never get the right word. Spelling the word or hand correcting it by typing solves the problem, but I'm halted frequently while dictating and it is discouraging that the vocabulary for this wonderful tool will not include all of the words in the English dictionary.

I have to admit that I am addicted in the evening while watching TV, during the boring commercials to turn to the Publisher Clearinghouse set of games for fun and collecting tokens. Where I am now is something like 472 million tokens and climbing. Hoping for seeing the PCH home visit squad arrive at my door with only $7000 a week for the rest of my life. The contest says you do not have to buy anything, so I don't. Only play the games for the fun and the tokens, like you do, I'm sure. It's like waiting for the lottery without paying for a ticket. With about the same outcome only I'm not out two dollars and having fun.

The game I like to play most is 60 Second Wordplay. In only a minute, I can get 2500 tokens almost every time. But the censoring on this game is even worse than on Dragon. Last night, I found the letters that spelled H-O-L-E. They were not accepted as a real word. They certainly do not accept words spelled like H-O-A-R, because that word is so vile as to cause windowpanes to get frost on them. And I think, but I don't remember exactly that if I spell G-A-Y, it is not recognized, probably for its gaiety. There are many more that I didn't take note of and don't remember, but I think you get the point.

These failed words definitely slow me up in seeking three or four letter words to beat the clock, so I usually succeed in getting the 1500 points necessary for 2500 tokens anyway. So what is my point? I don't think any software should be censoring us just because it is afraid of ramifications from various political directions. Word burning is getting to be a big thing. We authors need to fight it.

Copyright 2022 © Ronald W. Hull

5/3/22