Recently I came across a discussion on Twitter where a selection of scientists were arguing that the long-used term "blind peer review" (i.e. where the authors do not know the identities of the reviewers, and vice versa) could be construed as able-ist and should be referred to as "anonymous peer review". I'm all in favour of using inclusive language, but at the time this discussion struck me as odd because I've never connected the definition of "blind" in "blind peer review" to the disability, although its obvious that the link exists from a linguistic standpoint. What are your thoughts on such discussions? I do believe that none of those arguing for the change were themselves blind.
Not OC, but I am also totally blind, so I'll bite. IMHO, just more silliness. The biggest problems that I as a blind person face don't generally stem from my blindness. Don't get me wrong, it's incredibly inconvenient, and causes a whole host of problems. But the biggest, most life altering problems tend to stem from societies misconceptions. And the best weapon we have against misconceptions is communication. But all this fuss over words does not aid communication in any way. In fact, I think it does the exact opposite.
The only thing the language police have done for us is to make communication more awkward. How am I supposed to have a real conversation with anyone if they're constantly worried they're going to not use the right code words (which, by the way, change routinely). How is a blind person supposed to convince a potential employer that they can handle the work when they (according to the language police) can't even handle people using regular words. People learn by asking questions, and people aren't likely to ask questions if they are afraid of stepping on a verbal landmine and being labeled insensitive, or worse.
I don't know who the language police think they're serving by all this outrage and/or false concern, but it certainly isn't me. If I need to, I can get offended on my own behalf just fine thanks.
Wiktionary has attestations for use of 'blind' to mean 'concealed' or 'not visible' going all the way back to the 16th century, and if you follow the etymology it becomes likely that that was the original sense of the word, with 'sightless' coming later. This same disingenuous reasoning was used with Twitch with the phrase 'blind playthrough' (to mean 'playing a game without having seen any of it before').
Got to love scrubbing the culture of positive references to blindness in the service of inclusiveness simply because bunch of scientists are uncomfortable with disability.
I remember the second in command of a rather esteemed starship remarking that somebody should be taking notes about how a blind man teaches an android to paint.
