....

It is generally regarded as having been brought to public knowledge and popularised from its use in the name of The Spastics Society (now Scope), a charity for people with cerebral palsy, which was founded in 1951 and has a reasonably high public profile from its street collections and charity shops.

However, the term began to be used as an insult,derogative and became a term of abuse for an ungainly or physically inept person, derived from a common misconception that those with any physical disability resulting in spasticity would necessarily also have a mental or developmental disability. It is often colloquially abbreviated to forms such as "spa", "spaz", "spazmoid", "spazzer", "spazmo", "spack", "spackhead", "sped", "spazzy", "spacko", or "spacker" .

During the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981) the BBC attempted to bring the hidden world of physical disabilities to a widespread audience by presenting one person's brave struggle with a debilitating condition. Several episodes of the children's show Blue Peter featured a man with cerebral palsy (described as a "spastic") named Joey Deacon. Rather than encouraging understanding, the show generated unexpected negative consequences as Mr Deacon became the subject of ridicule from many of the show's viewers. Phrases such as "You Joey" and "You spaz" became popular insults amongst children at that time.[3] The Spastics Society changed its name to Scope in 1994. Since then, the term "Scoper" or "Scopee" has gained some popularity as an insult.[citation needed]

It is therefore argued (by some) that Blue Peter caused "spastic" and its abbreviations to develop highly offensive connotations. The widespread casual use of these terms as playground insults by children who did not fully understand physical disability caused great distress to people with cerebral palsy and their carers and contributed to an increased stereotyping and misunderstanding of disability throughout society.[3]

The rebranding can also be seen as part of the anti-discrimination movement of that period, and resulted in the terms dropping out of common usage as the majority of British society came to regard them as offensive and politically incorrect.

In the mid-1980s, some people attempted to "reclaim" the term. This is the meaning in the Ian Dury and the Blockheads song "Spasticus (Autisticus)", and it is also used in the Ben Elton book Gridlock. There is also a movie called "I'm Spasticus" (a wordplay on "I'm Spartacus"). The group 2NU best known for their early 90s Top 40 song "Ponderous" wrote a song called "Spaz Attack".[citation needed]

The current connotations of the word are well-illustrated by a BBC survey in 2003, which found that "spastic" was the second most offensive term in the UK relating to disability (retard was deemed most offensive) [2]. In 2007, Lynne Murphy, a linguist at the University of Sussex, described the term as being "one of the most taboo insults to a British ear".[1]

Posted By: SCC 28 on December 13th 2008 at 22:22:05

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