Donna Flagg

What’s In a Name? A lot of confusion for one thing
June 22, 2008

Just as I was posting my last blog entry about how political correctness has infiltrated the workplace and exacerbated our need to name things a certain way, it triggered additional thought about our dependence on labels and definitions in the first place. While having words to identify things is admittedly a linguistic necessity, I think often times it also comes at the price of considerable distortion.

Here’s an example of what I mean…

Last year I’d been written about in the New York Times. The story was about dyslexia in the workplace. Naturally, as the feature on the front page of the Sunday Job Market section, it (and I) got some exposure. That exposure prompted many a phone call to my office, the most mind-boggling of which came from a woman who worked at a university in Florida and studied learning disabilities. She berated me for “being part of the problem.” Why? Because I allowed myself to be labeled a person with a learning disability. Huh?

She was armed with “evidence” based in theory after theory, naming study after study that people with learning disabilities weren’t disabled at all. “How could I?” she asked. Why did she care? I thought. What she completely failed to grasp was that I was the evidence. It didn’t matter what anyone called me. I tried to tell her that she was ascribing way too much power to a name of something she obviously did not understand, despite her education and expertise in the field.

Granted, while having dyslexia may have prevented me from becoming a biochemist, tax attorney or astronaut, it has not prevented me from doing anything that I have actually wanted to do.  That is the point.

Labels - we can’t live without them, but maybe we should try not to take them so seriously.  I say we'd all be better off in the long run as a result.

Posted by Donna Flagg on June 22, 2008 | Comments (1)