| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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Page 193
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| used at all levels with complete naturalness, red and yellow are now rarely encountered and in most contexts are looked on as offensive | 1 |
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black,
brown,
red,
white, and
yellow. | 2 |
colored
| | Colored, or coloured, is recorded in its racial sense as early as 1611, but it did not become widespread in American English until after the Civil War, when the newly freed black population began to embrace it as a respectful alternative to black or negro. Well into the 20th century colored remained a self-chosen term of pride, as evidenced by its use in the name of the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) founded in 1909 and continuing under that name even today. By mid-century, however, the term colored had been largely supplanted among black Americans, first by the recently capitalized Negro and later by black and African American. As colored lost favor in the black population, its use by outsiders became more clearly offensive. | 3 |
| In the United States, colored has usually been spelled lowercase and has been virtually synonymous with black or Negro as those terms are used in American society, that is, with reference to any person of African ancestry regardless of mixture with European or other non-African peoples. In South Africa it is written uppercase—Coloured—and has long been applied specifically to persons of mixed-race parentage as opposed to racially unmixed blacks, whites, and Asians. | 4 |
crippled
| | The adjective crippled and the corresponding noun cripple are now considered offensively blunt when used of a person with a hindering or incapacitating physical condition. The current preference in most cases is for disabled, as in an accident that left her disabled or improved access for the disabled. But when the emphasis shifts from the person to the impairment itself, there is generally no reason to avoid the stronger term. Thus while you might choose to say He was increasingly disabled by multiple sclerosis, you might describe the disease itself as crippling, especially if your purpose is to stress the seriousness of its physical effects. There is a great difference between the insensitive labeling of a particular person as a cripple and the deliberate use of such a word for its vivid effect, as in this quote from the Washington Post: “There is no more devastating blow to the human psyche than to be transformed in microseconds from a healthy robust human being into a cripple. “ | 5 |
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disabled. | 6 |
deaf
| | The rise of the Deaf Pride movement in the 1980s has introduced a distinction between the lowercase deaf and the capitalized form Deaf. A person who is unable to hear or whose hearing is only minimal is properly termed deaf. A deaf person who belongs to the community that has formed around the use of American Sign Language as the preferred means of communication is said to be Deaf or a member of Deaf culture. The issue of capitalization is different with deaf than it is for black. In the case of black, the decision whether to capitalize is essentially a matter of personal or political preference; | 7 |
| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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