Currents
Little people, bad word
June-July 2009

 

by Linda Lowenthal

Most of us are familiar with the various words that can be used to insult specific groups of people, though I assume no one reading this would think of doing so. But here’s one that some people may not realize could cause offense: midget.

The history of this term is an interesting study in how and why words come to wound. Derived from midge (the tiny insect), midget was coined in the 19th century—probably not, as is sometimes thought, by P.T. Barnum, but certainly in a milieu that embraced the practice of displaying physically unusual people as public curiosities. “It’s impossible to think about the word midget without placing it within the context of the freak show,” the journalist Dan Kennedy wrote in Little People, his 2003 book about his experiences as the father of a daughter with the form of dwarfism called achondroplasia.

Still, midget apparently didn’t upset anyone at the time. Instead, it took on the use with which many people still associate it today—as a term for people who are normally proportioned but abnormally small, as opposed to dwarfs, who are atypical in the proportion of their limbs to their bodies as well as in their overall size. Of the two words, midget may actually have been the less insulting, since standard proportions were considered preferable.

Things began to change in the 20th century, though it’s not entirely clear why—maybe because the world of the freak show became more appalling as it grew less familiar, maybe because the idea of a “better class” of dwarfism itself came to seem offensive. (At the same time, possibly because of the power of alliteration, unflattering metaphorical terms like mental midget and moral midget are fairly common, while I can’t think of any such insults based on dwarf.) Though little person had a run of popularity from the mid-20th century (in part because it encompassed small-statured individuals of all proportions), dwarf—a word that dates to Old English—now seems to be the closest thing to a neutral term among people with a stake in the matter. Midget, in these circles, has become as inflammatory as the n-word. The New York Times acknowledged this shift in April by amending its stylebook to prescribe dwarf as the usual term.

How is a situation inflamed, though, if no one is knowingly lighting a match? Many people still believe that the difference between dwarf and midget has to do merely with the proportion issue. (That’s basically what Copy Editor said in 1998, responding to a reader who wrote, “I read recently that the mayor of Houston had suspended a city councilwoman for calling someone a midget instead of a dwarf. What is so offensive about midget?” The editor wrote that the councilor’s offense was not calling the person a midget but laughing about it.) I found about equal numbers of dictionaries labeling midget “offensive” and not labeling it at all; Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, which listed the word without comment in its 10th edition, deems it “sometimes offensive” in the current 11th edition, a step down from the “usu offensive” associated with the standard racial epithets. Meanwhile, dwarf intuitively strikes some as a strange thing to call a fellow human being, evocative as it is of Snow White and Middle-earth. (“In the sense ‘an abnormally small person,’ dwarf is normally considered offensive,” The New Oxford American Dictionary that came installed on my iBook states, perhaps less than accurately. “However, there are no accepted alternatives in the general language, since terms such as person of restricted growth have gained little currency.” Gee, I can’t imagine why. Midget gets no such note in this dictionary, though it’s labeled “often offensive.”) As for little person, it “sounds very derogatory,” Matt Roloff—now, ironically, a star of the reality TV show Little People, Big World—told Dan Kennedy. “It sounds more derogatory than the word midget. Just instinctively, people think little person would be a demeaning term.”

Yet while little people may be associated with children, leprechauns, and the poor saps who, according to Leona Helmsley, are the only ones doomed to pay taxes, my sense is that those who use this term are given points for trying, even by folks who don’t prefer it. The same can’t be said of midget, even if it’s used in equally good faith by people who vaguely realize that one term is less acceptable than the others and are scrambling to work out from first principles which one that is.

Whether a word is really an insult if it’s not intended as such is an interesting philosophical question, I suppose, and why people have invested emotional energy in learning to be wounded by a word that’s rarely uttered with actual malice may be an interesting sociological one. But hey—using midget stands a good chance of hurting someone, and it’s hard to envision a situation in which not using it would make anyone’s writing less clear or graceful. Will you throw tomatoes if I say that avoiding it is not that tall an order?