Let’s begin with a reminder that an Afghan is a noun for a person, an afghan is a wool shawl, and an Afghani is a unit of currency, though a Pakistani is a guy. Country suffixes are complicated, but it’s worth being a stickler on simple nouns. Yet, I balked at something I saw recently: “person of Afghan descent.” No doubt you have heard the noun phrase “person of [whatever] descent,” as perfectly good stand-alone words such as Frenchman, Irishman, and Indian become more socially unwieldy. You will have also encountered “person of color.” It’s the new “African American,” a too-keen, strenuous attempt to sound correct that it’s hard to imagine anyone outside of the PTA at an exclusive school really using in casual conversation. What you may not know is that this construction is a function of an explicit ideological program to get us to change the syntax of how we talk about groups of people. It’s called “person-first language.” It comes from disability activism, and it is dumb.
Per Tara Haelle of the Association of Healthcare Journalists, constructions such as “epileptic child” or “diabetic adult” are “called ‘identity-first’ language, as opposed to ‘person-first’ language where the person literally comes first: ‘children with epilepsy’ and ‘adults with diabetes.’” Guided by valuing “the thoughtfulness of thinking responsibly about how powerful language is and the ethical importance of getting it right,” she explains that writers need “resources on the use of appropriate, respectful language when it comes to how we identify the people who are living with various conditions or disabilities.”
The people who think this is “ethically important” include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which maintains a page of recommended “preferred terms for select population groups and communities.” Instead of “disabled,” try “person with disabilities.” Instead of “homeless people,” try “people experiencing homelessness.” Instead of “drug-users/addicts/drug abusers,” try “persons who use drugs/people who inject drugs.”
According to this bizarre theory, saying “diabetic guy” would communicate to the diabetic guy that you may not think he is a person. Why would he think that? Because you didn’t put the “person” first. I don’t understand this at all. It’s an argument based on an unintuitive pun, the sort of thing that might be thrown out as a crossword clue, to think that constructing a phrase with a word literally first conveys deep beliefs. I have never met anyone with such a wispy sense of self that they require other people to verbally affirm that they are a person, lest they come to suspect that others think they are not one. Writing this way is just suspicious and awkward.
There is evidence to back me up. Spectrum, a magazine of autism issues, adopted the “person-first” thing and then found by actually talking to autistic people that they generally didn’t care. “As of July 2018 we use person-first and identity-first language interchangeably,” the magazine’s editors announced. In the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, we learn of research finding that in academic writing, scholars mainly use “person-first” for stigmatized conditions. “As numerous disability scholars have argued, person-first language ‘may have overcorrected to the point of further stigmatizing disability.’ … Person-first language may do ‘the exact opposite of what it purports to do’ by signaling ‘shame instead of true equality.’” No kidding. And “rather than avoiding linguistic ‘bias against persons or groups’ on the basis of disability, as the American Medical Association directs scholarly authors to do, scholarly authors may actually be imparting such bias.” Oops. Learning this should not have required a study, just common sense.
