Golfer Tiger Woods has been criticised for saying he played like ‘a spaz’. Can using the word ever be right?
Last Sunday, I watched the final round of the Masters on CBS. Viewers didn’t see as much of Tiger Woods as they normally might have, at least until he made a final, futile charge over the last few holes. The problem, as Wood admitted to during a post-round interview, was his putting. He was the personification of the old saw, “Drive for show; putt for dough.”…and to say his putter failed him would be something of an understatement. During the interview, when asked what happened to him, he said that he had “played like a spaz.” At the time, I remember thinking that it was odd phraseology, if for no other reason than you really hear that today. Never did I think that someone out there might actually be offended by Woods’ honest characterization of his golf game.
I can understand both sides of the “controversy”, if this qualifies as such. What I have a difficult time understanding is why anyone would think that Woods was being deliberately insulting or deliberately degrading those who may be…oh, how shall I put this without risking offense?…differently abled. He had played a round of golf that lost him the most important and revered tournament in golf, and he was disappointed with himself. Could he have chosen his words more carefully? Perhaps. Does this make him guilty of gratuitously insulting a disabled, or “differently abled” group of people? Give me a break…
Are we now so sensitized to language that celebrities must self-edit their every public utterance? Are there people out there so hyper-sensitive that they feel the need to scrutiinize anything that comes out of the mouth of a celebrity to determine if they should claim offense? Can we all just relax and stop taking ourselves so seriously?
Two years ago I was involved in a linguistic incident at work. I called a disabled colleague a spaz after hearing he’d spilt coffee over yet another expensive bit of computer kit.
My colleague laughed it off. It was a friendly bit of banter - spaz in this case meaning I thought he was being a bit of a stereotype like the helpless disabled people you used to see in telethons and charity posters.
I use the term with irony as someone who was regularly called a “spaz” in the school playground, though I’m visually impaired and not what we once called “a spastic”.
To confuse the issue, a non-disabled colleague had overheard and told me that she found that term offensive and thanked me not to use it in front of her. I was offended that she was offended because I didn’t feel it was her place to be offended… after all, it’s not her word and she wouldn’t have been taunted with it.
I’m not advocating that celebrities, or anyone else, should consider it open season to gratuitously insult entire classes of people. What I am saying is that we can choose whether or not to be insulted, and something such as seemingly innocent as Woods’ “spaz” description of his golf game doesn’t seem to be worth the effort. Certainly, hearing someone denigrate ones race, gender, or intelligence may well be causing for taking offense, but it seems that too many of us are looking for things to be take offense over.
So what did Tiger Woods mean when he said: “I was so in control from tee to green, the best I’ve played for years… But as soon as I got on the green I was a spaz.”
He was describing a poor performance. A flawed performance. An impaired performance. Many e-mails to the Ouch! website on Tuesday were from people wanting to point out that spaz means something different in America. “It just means idiot,” one reader wrote. Idiot with an etymological nod towards spasticity though?
Is the fact that a nation has lost sight of the origins of the word a good or bad thing? Is it harmful or is it genuinely meaningless now?….
Though this golfing incident has whipped up some interesting discussions around language, I’m convinced Tiger never meant to use the word offensively.
But has this whole debate just fanned the flames of those who rail against so-called political correctness or has it made people think about how they might subconsciously be putting disabled people down?
To his credit, Woods has apologized, though I’m not sure it was necessary for him to do so. It seems that when it comes to language, we hold celebrities to a higher standard than we hold ourselves. I suppose this is just another example of public language running up against private hypocrisy.
Now can we please lose the PC hypocrisy and relax?
