President Obama’s ‘Special Olympics’ gaffe [see video here] was to News Hour more humanising than alarming, although we were surprised to note that such a thing as the ‘Special’ Olympics still existed – speaking from a semantic perspective. Is ‘paralympics’ not a more politically correct term? Or is the adoption of special a move akin to gay people reclaiming the once purely pejorative ‘queer’ and turning it into a badge of pride?
Here is the ‘Special Olympics’ website in the US, and in the UK.
Still, apparently the confusion is ours. According to Wikipedia, the ‘Special Olympics’ deals in intellectual disabilities, while the Paralympics handles physical and visual disabilities. But does that make the persistence of the word ‘special’ any less surprising?
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 