Disability = Taboo

TV personality Al Roker recently got in trouble for making jokes about people with epilepsy. Mark Aranoff, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, uses the incident to examine why, in his view, disability is the most taboo subject in American culture. Here's his conclusion:

"Taboos reflect the preoccupations of the societies in which they are embedded. Disability will be verbally charged as long as we are preoccupied with the physical and emotional perfection that few of us can aspire to. We will either get over it and accept ourselves, as the Dove soap campaign for real beauty exhorts us to, or, in a future more reminiscent of another Woody Allen movie, Sleeper, we will have plastic surgery and Prozac for all, greeting more-serious disabilities with an exceedingly awkward silence."

Mark Aronoff is a professor of linguistics and associate provost at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.