LAURIE BLOCK: One of my daughters walks with braces and crutches, and she identifies herself as a person with a disability fairly readily. Recently, as we were driving on the highway, a van from the Shriner's Hospital for Crippled Children passed us, and she asked me, "What's a cripple?" She had never heard the word. But Anthony Tussler remembers it well.

ANTHONY TUSSLER: I remember using the word "crippled" to describe myself because it was a hard word, and it was a word that captured some of what makes having a disability so tough.

BLOCK: Names change as the times change. Kate Gaynor has cerebral palsy.

KATE GAYNOR: If I ever wrote my autobiography, I was going to title it, "I was born colored and crippled, but now I'm black and disabled."

BLOCK: Irv Zola:

IRVING ZOLA: Like people of color, and like women, people with disability are struggling over what they're called, [partly] because they realize that one of the most powerful things a person in a superior position can do to someone below is to name them.

BLOCK: Disability pushes hard on what we think identity means, and when our language describing people with disabilities changes, there's a reason. Sometimes more than one reason. Historian Doug Baynton:

DOUG BAYNTON: You can construct an interesting history of attitudes toward disability by looking at the words that people use. The word "affliction" was most commonly used in the nineteenth century.

BLOCK: Affliction: You can still hear the word today, but people with disabilities often really dislike being described as afflicted with this or that because it implies a perpetually wounded state, and maybe you feel good and spry most of the time. But the sticking power of the term comes from its roots in nineteenth century, Protestant, religious beliefs. Doug Baynton pays close attention to how language reflects beliefs and values.

BAYNTON: An affliction was what we would call a disability today, though it was also a broader term that could refer to various kinds of misfortunes. God, in His mysterious wisdom, had afflicted someone with this particular burden, and they were supposed to bear it with patience and faith, trusting that the affliction was part of some larger plan. People were afflicted for a reason -- to learn a lesson, to teach other people pity and charity, and so on.

BLOCK: Anthony Tussler:

ANTHONY TUSSLER: I grew up in the fifties as a disabled child, and became a young adult in the sixties. And the word they used to describe us was "handicapped." And it was a word that I always rejected because it, I knew that it was a euphemism for something darker, and scarier, and worse, and no one had ever talked about what that was.

BAYNTON: It's interesting how "handicapped" arose. It was very much tied to the kind of competitive, social-evolutionist worldview that was ubiquitous in the late nineteenth century. BLOCK: The term "handicapped" originally comes from a game called "Hand in Cap," a game of chance, and the phrase attached itself to horse racing.

BAYNTON: You would handicap a fast horse by hanging stones on it to slow it down.

BLOCK: Then, it was applied to people with disabilities.

BAYNTON: It always occurred in the phrase, "handicapped in the race for life," "handicapped in the struggle for existence," that sort of thing. While an "affliction" was a spiritual burden to be borne with faith and lived with as best as possible, in submission to God's wisdom, a "handicap" was a condition to be conquered, an impediment to worldly success that had to be overcome.