Imagine a life of complete and utter darkness. Imagine not being able to see the beautiful colors of a rainbow or a bouquet of flowers, only being able to smell or hear about what they look like. It is something that many blind people incur in their daily lives. Now imagine hearing for the first time, that because you are blind, you are different from everyone else. You are disabled. What does this mean exactly? Who came up with this word? Why I am disabled and everyone else is normal? These are just a few of the questions that come to mind, when you hear that shocking blow. Disabled people go through this for a good portion of their life, but why?.
Simi Linton's "Reassigning Meaning" examines the word disabled and various other words that correspond with that categorization. Linton perceives that the word disabled separates the dominant group and the minority. She is right in saying this, because the word disabled implies different, or strange. Linton breaks down the word by its prefix -dis. This prefix, she describes, takes it root from Latin meaning apart or asunder. Automatically this establishes a relationship of separation. She believes that it is a word that eases the mind of the dominant group so much as to almost forget about the minority. That is the overall mentality of contemporary culture. It fears what is different, so it disassociates itself from the unordinary. However culture did not just arrive at this proposition all by itself. It derived from medieval culture and what they did to separate themselves from disabled people.
In the medieval time period, a disability was looked upon as something that you had brought upon yourself. Therefore you were excommunicated from society, because it was God's will that you were disabled. That is how culture began to perceive the disabled, as not good enough for God, so not good enough for us. This is obviously an extreme point of view that is not too common in contemporary civilization, but from this point of view derived what society uses today.