A few months ago in a segment about the difference between “continuously” and “continually,” I wanted to give an example of something that is done continually, so I wrote, “Many type I diabetics have to give themselves shots multiple times a day. They are continually giving themselves shots.”
And soon after, I received an email from Rick in Kelowna, British Columbia that read,
“You refer to those of us with diabetes as ‘diabetics.’ Diabetes does not define our life (that is, there is much more to us than a disease we have) so the modern trend apparently is to refer to ‘people with diabetes’ rather than ‘diabetics.’ Do you refer to people with cancer as ‘cancerics’? People with a cold as ‘coldics’?”
That is an excellent point, Rick, and the term you hear a lot for that kind of rephrasing is “person-first language,” which coincidentally was something I started looking into right after I wrote that piece about “continuously” and “continually” and wish I had done a week earlier.
Should you say ‘diabetics’ or ‘people with diabetes’?
“Person-first language” means that you’re putting the emphasis on the person and not on the disease. It’s a little longer to say “people with diabetes” than “diabetics,” but it honors them more as people, and that’s certainly worth a few extra words.
Person-first language may be a new concept to some of you, but it’s not actually that new. A Google Ngram search, which shows how often words and phrases appear in edited books, shows that around 1980, the use of the word “diabetics” started to fall, while at the same time the use of the phrase “people with diabetes” started to rise. The change was pretty dramatic from 1980 to 1990,...
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