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Blindness and Deafness as Metaphors: An Anthological Essay

This essay consists of 52 quotations from contemporary writers who use variations of the words ‘blindness’ and ‘deafness’ as pejorative metaphors. The quotations are arranged as a narrative so that they constitute both an anthology of metaphors of disablement and a critique of them. The essay examines how a culture expresses its values through its metaphors, especially those that reach the status of conventionalized idioms, clichés, and figures of speech. Authorship alone is not the issue here; the essay further explores the subject of dissemination, and how certain publication sites such as the editorial pages of The New York Times might be regarded a barometer of linguistic permissiveness. In this respect, a sense of the status quo concerning the disabled in Western society might be gleaned from metaphors of disablement like these, and the unseemly ease with which they are written, printed, and disseminated in culture today.