Wednesday, April 12, 2006

"Playing like a spaz"

Tiger Woods, the golfer described his own performance the other day by saying, "I played like a spaz"... and I had typed a very long piece about this, full of references to negative semantic space, historical tributes to an icon of my teenage years (Joey Deacon) and Language & Representation, but some s*d just blew a fuse in our house, so it's all gone. Curses!

So have a look at this article about the words "spaz" and "spastic" from the BBC news website and its disability issues site, Ouch,and I reckon you can work out why it's interesting and how it might help you with your work on ENA1 Language & Representation.

And check out the top 10 most hated words as voted for by Ouch's readers. What's interesting to me is how different the two sets of charts are: the words hated by disabled people are quite different to those voted for by non-disabled people. Why might this be?


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