Thought of the Day 01.11.10

Our language has been so ravaged by deconstructing postmodernists that we might be said to suffer from chronic terminology obsession syndrome. People aren’t short, they’re vertically challenged. People aren’t handicapped, they’re differently-abled. And people don’t commit sexual sin, they simply have alternative lifestyles. Yet despite all the effort to reframe our thinking through Orwellian language abuse, one rather unacceptable term seems to have gone unnoticed.

When a person is still alive but with negligible brain function, we say she is a “vegetable.” Perhaps we try to sound slightly more erudite by saying she is “in a persistent vegetative state,” but that’s just the same word with a doily wrapped around it. There are all sorts of terms that could be used for such a person. Non-cognitive. Mentally inactive. Even brain dead strikes me as fairly innocuous.

People are made in the image of God with all the dignities this entails. No matter how much function they have lost, comparing them to produce seems pretty obviously unacceptable.