Ever since reading a piece about how use of visual metaphors excludes people who are blind, I've sought to avoid using visual metaphors as a matter of equity and accessibility. I'm trying not to use terminology that isn't equally available to all. An example that comes up again and again in all kinds of documents: I change "See Appendix A" to "Refer to Appendix A." Whether you're reading print or Braille or listening to a screen reader, you can refer to an appendix.
English in and of itself is not equally available to all. So as I choose words, do I sort my way through all the layers that they bring and all that they stand for? When I do that, what will change in my writing and speech? I research* idioms and phrases I learned as a child to check on** whether they have a racist history I wasn't aware of (true more often than I ever would have guessed).
I came at this question first because of my work in traffic safety, a topic in which the physical world and the language used to describe transportation are so often automobility centered, or "motonormative," to use a term coined by Ian Walker. I give talks in which I tell people to be mode-neutral in order to be mode-inclusive. In other words, re-examine statements to uncover those hidden biases and -isms.
What does this reexamination mean for everyday speech about things that aren't traffic? What is it that we center, decenter, acknowledge within a wider circle? How do we draw that circle larger and larger so that what we say has meaning for more and more people?
I'm almost calling for us to translate our own works into other words. When I read poetry in the morning and they acknowledge that a poem was translated, I don't know what was lost through that. I also don't know what was gained.
If we translate our own words into new words we may lose a bit of something we're used to. The exercise of finding new ways to express ourselves in more inclusive ways provides so many gains. As we undertake this rethinking of how we express ourselves what will we notice, perceive, recognize, comprehend, acknowledge, process?
* For "research" I could have used "look up". I chose not to.
** For "check on" I could have used "see". I chose not to.
Edited to add: Shortly after publishing this I read a piece about Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize acceptance speech that adds so much more depth to a discussion of the power of language, with a story about blindness to illustrate the point.
"Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction." — Toni Morrison
