To me, it makes more sense to educate people than it does to excoriate them for a violation of political correctness that they don't even know they are committing.ĭwarf is an ancient word dating back many centuries. Within the dwarf community, the response to what is sometimes called 'the M-word' is visceral but, obviously, it is also learned. Before her daughter had been born, I couldn't imagine that this mother was any more capable of parsing dwarf and 'midget' than we had been. Once, at an LPA parents' meeting, I heard an average-size mother say that she nearly burst into tears of rage the first time someone referred to her dwarf child as a 'midget'. It turns out to be a whole lot more complicated than that.

Before we started attending LPA meetings, my wife Barbara and I would have guessed that dwarf and 'midget' were equally offensive (or inoffensive), and that little person, a term with which we were vaguely aware, was probably the most acceptable. Everything else - 'little person,' 'LP,' 'dwarf,' 'person with dwarfism,' 'achon,' 'hey you,' - falls somewhere in between.

The best thing you can call our daughter is 'Rebecca' or 'Becky.' The worst is 'midget'.