Thursday, October 05, 2006

Being autistic can make you dynamic

As I'm not able to access a computer very much at the moment I've sort ignored the more tittle-tattle type stories over the past few days. One of those stories was George Osbourne's rather benign comment which has been portrayed as him making fun of Gordon Brown and those with autism.

In an interview with the Deputy Editor from the Times, Mary Ann Sieghart, Osbourne was talking about his own childhood and Sieghart suggested he might have been mildly autistic. Osbourne's response was to quickly say "We’re not getting on to Gordon Brown yet!" Clearly a reference to the Robert Harris accusation that Brown is autistic.

I'm not going to go into each and every reaction to the comment as Mary Ann Sieghart has done that anyway in her piece today. But one thing she hasn't mentioned was the perceptive point that Francis Wheen made in the Standard on the same day. He said that if we're going to be offended by the term "autism" if used ina perjorative and adjective sense then we should stop using the word schizophrenic to describe political ambivalence.

The wider concern here though is political correctness and the slow but sure creation of doublespeak in today's society. I heard another of these the other day in that one of the largest recruitment consultancy in the UK was removing the word "dynamic" from it's job descriptions and requirements because of ageism laws. Doubleplusgood I thought!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have read MAS's account of this and it is quiet clear that she was the one who first mentioned the word autistic in the interview, using it in its inappropriate form, she admits to being overwhelmed by the furore it caused. Why can't we accept that there are some geniuses who have an incredible intellect, but are not good communicators, it's not a crime, they are simply flawed human beings like the rest of us.

And btw, one of my sons loves tucking into steak and kidney pie, is that a crime too!