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I never want to hear anyone say again that "nobody calls someone a 'cripple' anymore". Perhaps consider this somewhat less grotesque alternate phrasing: "Steinmetz was a person who experienced significant and debilitating disability".
That's not only an incorrect understanding of natural selection, i'd add that Steinmetz chose not to reproduce. If he hadn't been the topic of your next sentence, I wouldn't have felt the need to emphasise his personal agency. Or his existence as a person
I know he chose to not have kids and the phrasing I used has been used with him in particular forever to emphasize the extreme challenges he had to deal with. Its great you like a certain more generic phrasing which could be applied to anyone.
If you wanted to emphasise the challenges he dealt with, adjectives for his physical appearance were not a good choice. The challenges he would have dealt with may have included chronic pain, limited mobility and discrimination. You could even have said he suffered from kyphosis. But words which have been frequently intended to be derogatory don't do much to create a sense of empathy.
And it's nice to see disability being normalised, even if that wasn't your intent.
where do you get cripple is a physical appearance description? do video game thieves use differentialy abled strike? ten years from now you will have folks say using disability or disabled makes you worse than hitler. the words only have deragatory meaning to those who have decided they are such.
Even if we ignored the entire history of the word cripple, it still would be remarkable to not consider hunchback or dwarf as physical descriptions. Given that your next question references video games and then we fall down Godwin's slippery slope, I'm not convinced you're honestly engaging with the concept of connotation.
Yes, and when the people who have to live with the consequences of discrimination tell you that you're speaking in the same way as those who have discriminated against them, it's worth considering. Even momentarily.
Have a great day, I'm going to go be a cripple elsewhere now. Nah, just kidding, it will still be my couch. Just not this thread.
Yes as I said. Down the line disabled will be used such and because we cow tow to such people disabled will be such in a decade. Im not honestly engaging in the concept of connotation in that im not sure if that is what we are discussing as it is not a commonly used word so and not using them causes discourse to be rather limited. My god dwarfism is a thing as well and a dwarf implies a different condition than midget. These words actually have meaning outside of use as a derogatory which again is not their main usage. These words were not created as deragatories. Where I grew up in the middle of the block was a place called NSAR. I don't remember what it all stood for but the R was retardation. Now this place housed, fed, educated, and helped adult people with retartdation get jobs. Did they do this to troll them with their deragatory name. No, they did not collect and spend this money for their welfare in a secret mission to be jerks. On the other hand there has been a troll individual using the term in troll posts that I have reported and downvoted because they are just throwing it around as an insult. Due to such usage its now avoided, and it is a freakin medical term. We seen this with things like woke and pepe the frog and I have heard people use special or differentially abled to sarcastically insult someone. We can cede terms all we want but its not going to stop jerks from being jerks and maybe people consider me a jerk for feeling this way but I still feel the way one uses language by some should not have us just throwing things out of the lexicon.