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rolig commented on the word pride day
Today (June 18), Wikipedia tells me, is Autistic Pride Day. And this got me to thinking about how pride is used here. No one, I suspect, is really "proud" to be autistic in the way, for example, my mother was "proud" to be a Virginian (and even had a coffee mug that proclaimed this fact) or someone might be "proud" to have won a spelling bee. In the first of these examples, "pride" comes from being associated with something you see as representing wonderful and desirable things (a tradition, a landscape, certain values), while in the second "pride" comes from having personally accomplished something. Few people would, I expect – and please correct me if I am wrong – argue that autism is something wonderful and desirable (though I am quite willing to believe that people who have autism can be wonderful), nor is having autism an accomplishment. I am willing to concede that there may have developed (or be developing) a culture around autism, consisting of people with autism and the people who love and care for them, that is truly something to be proud of, so if this is the meaning of the phrase "autistic pride", that's great. But I think the original idea is that autism is nothing to be ashamed of. Which I certainly agree with. And so in this sense "pride" means, essentially, "unshame" or, to put it differently, "self-acceptance and the demand to be accepted by others". The same idea, of course, originally lay behind such concepts as "black pride" and "gay pride" (which also has its day), though these concepts have also expanded to include pride in a culture, similar to the pride that was proclaimed on my mother's coffee mug.
Now I have just checked my widget dictionary (Oxford American) and see that one of the submeanings of "pride" is "the consciousness of one's own dignity" – and this seems adequate to that sense of "unshame" in Autistic Pride Day (though the example the dictionary gives, "He swallowed his pride and asked for help," doesn't really seem to fit this, in my opinion).
June 18, 2008
reesetee commented on the word pride day
Agreed, rolig, on the OA submeaning. Another example is the Deaf pride culture, in which I believe it carries dual meanings--those who believe in it are both proud of being Deaf and are self-accepting and demand acceptance from others. ("Deaf" capitalized deliberately, btw.)
June 18, 2008
Prolagus commented on the word pride day
See also dilseicx pired.
June 18, 2008
rolig commented on the word pride day
The Deaf movement is interesting. I think it started from the sense that one should not be ashamed to be deaf, and then evolved into the consciousness of a Deaf culture, with its own language, institutions, customs, traditions, etc., of which one could be proud.
June 18, 2008