People First, Please

My 1st post dealing with a sensitive subject. I often want to correct others use of language, especially those in the medical field. If you know me well, you know I choose my words carefully, always have. Language has so much power, the spoken word shapes, defines, manifests.


I cringe when I hear people refer to Aero as a 'Downs' or say Down's kid, child, baby. The proper use is Down syndrome not Down's (no apostrophe s). Aero is first and foremost, a person. Having Down syndrome or Trisomy 21 should not define him by placing the syndrome before his name. Aero is a child with Down syndrome, not a Down syndrome child. Do you see the difference? 

Perhaps Wikipedia does a better job;

People-first language is a form of linguistic prescriptivism in English, aiming to avoid perceived and subconscious dehumanization when discussing people with disabilities, as such forming an aspect of disability etiquette.

The basic idea is to impose a sentence structure that names the person first and the condition second, i.e. "people with disabilities" rather than "disabled people", in order to emphasize that "they are people first". Because English syntax normally places adjectives before nouns, it becomes necessary to insert relative clauses, replacing, e.g., "deaf person" with "a person who is deaf" or "asthmatic person" with "a person who has asthma." Furthermore, the use of to be is deprecated in favor of using to have, i.e. "a person who has a hearing impairment" over "a person who is deaf".

The speaker is thus expected to internalize the idea of a disability as a secondary attribute, not a characteristic of a person's identity. Critics of this rationale point out that the unnatural sentence structure draws even more attention to the disability than using unmarked English syntax, producing an additional "focus on disability in an ungainly new way".