"Despite being disabled"
- 19 Aug 05, 12:00 AM
Monkey had an email in his inbox this morning from an organisation wanting us to nominate people for their 'Achievement through Adversity' award. Monkey didn't nominate anyone. Monkey thought it was a weeny bit patronising.
But anyhoo, it got me thinking about adversity and that phrase 'despite his disability' and 'despite her disability' that disabled people loathe so much. To my mind it's only one short skip or jump away from 'despite being alive', and to disabled people a similar concept, though no one would ever use that phrase.
At these times of deep thought I like to turn to Google. As an interesting exercise I tapped in , and got 2,150,000 results. 'Despite her disability' got me results. Girls, you win. You're better. Or maybe this means that there simply aren't many pages about girls on the internet.
Interestingly, when you tap into Google you get 5,800,000 results. This could be seen as undermining my above argument, but I'm not gonna let that get me down, despite, um, everything.
Take a look at the Google result pages though, they're worth reading.
Comments
- and I hope Monkey told these patronising so-and-so's where to take their nominations?
Yes, but if you put your request in speech marks and get results for that exact phrase, you get a more accurate picture: "despite his disability" - 4570 "despite her disability" - 690 (you're right - us girls are terrific under-achievers) "despite being alive" - 249 So relatively little has been achieved by people despite being alive. Not sure about the implications for our species there.
I agree, the way they've put it is patronising, I reckon they should have put that phrase a different way. That has to be one of my dislikes, the way that disabled people can be percieved wrongly in society sometimes.