Victims Of Ourselves...MapAs A SecAs

“A lot of native speakers are happy that English has become the world’s global language. They feel they don’t have to spend time learning another language,” says Chong.

“But… often you have a boardroom full of people from different countries communicating in English and all understanding each other and then suddenly the American or Brit walks into the room and nobody can understand them.”

The non-native speakers, it turns out, speak more purposefully and carefully, typical of someone speaking a second or third language. Anglophones, on the other hand, often talk too fast for others to follow, and use jokes, slang and references specific to their own culture, says Chong. In emails, they use baffling abbreviations such as ‘OOO’, instead of simply saying that they will be out of the office.

English corporate speak is it’s own fucked up dialect. 

It’s so incomprehensible and exclusionary that even a native English speaker with a master’s degree in English will have difficulty parsing it. Trust me when I say that nobody who isn’t a business major knows what the fuck “synergy” means.

And the jargon’s just half the problem. The other half is the gross overuse of hobby-specific expressions and analogies.

Go to most corporate offices and you’ll be bombarded with sports analogies that only make sense to someone who spends all their free time watching ESPN.

I tracked down this quote I read in a tumblr post years ago:

“I remember working with a law school in which white men heavily dominated the faculty. They used lots of sports metaphors (doing an end run, Monday morning quarterbacking, and so on), with legal jargon thrown in for good measure. I suggested that this was not a particularly welcoming trait in their school, that in fact it was sexist, but they paid little attention. I made my point by speaking for about five minutes in dressmaking terms: putting a dart in here, a gusset there, cutting the budget on the bias so it would be more flexible, using a peplum to hide a course that might be controversial. The women in the room laughed; the men did not find it humorous….Language is power, make no mistake about it. It is used to include and exclude and to keep people and systems in their places.”

- Frances E. Kendall, Understanding White Privilege

My point is,

This kind of poor communication probably shouldn’t be blamed on monolingualism alone. It’s most certainly made worse by an exclusionary and elitist work culture.

-had to undergo very painful surgery to get automail

-had to relearn how to write because of his prosthesis (there’s a post going around showing he had to switch hands etc) and his handwriting is likely a lot worse due to that. This means automail isn’t super good for delicate work, unsurprising, considering what it’s made of. 

-experiences phantom limb pain and therefore other associated stuff (this was only really shown in the manga)

-cannot go anywhere too cold without changing his automail or he’ll get really bad frost bite and it will stop working

-cannot go anywhere too hot, period, because the metal attached and under his skin will overheat and he will be badly burned

-Reattachment is painful, but needs to be done frequently if he breaks or outgrows his automail

- it’s HEAVY so much so that the strain has the potential to cause stress on his body, enough that it’s even theorized as possibly stunting his growth.

-it requires regular maintenance or it will break down, as shown when he forgets to do that and it…breaks down

-when it does need to be repaired, it takes time to do that, during which Ed uses regular prosthetics (that usually don’t quite fit him).

-costs a lot of money (not a problem for Ed due to high state alchemist salary/having mechanics as surrogate family, but explicitly noted to being the reason why most people in the fmaverse stick to regular prosthetics along with the painful surgery)

So Ed can’t actually do everything perfectly and experiences a lot of extra hassle, problems and pain people without automail don’t have to deal with!  And any advantages he does have are more suited to fighting than day to day life (being able to incorporate weapons/fake out people who want to blow up his arm). 

Cyborg is a superhero who lost so much of his body that he became a cyborg. He suffers from the pain of it and the emotional toll but he is a superhero because of it.

Roy Harper lost his arm and the end is corrupted causing him pain and the prosthetic is imperfect and if put on wrong causes even more pain. He is still an archer.

Jessica Cruz has debilitating anxiety and PTSS to the point that she was too afraid to leave her house for three years until a macguffin gave her no choice in the matter. She is a green lantern, the superheroes chosen for their extraordinary will power.

Oracle or Barbara Gordon, lost the use of her legs after being attacked by the joker and then went on to be the most connected and most trusted member of the entire justice league. (See here, the titans being asked who leads the justice league as proof that they don’t need a leader, and them all offering different options before Lian, Roy’s daughter, pipes up with “Owacle” as the leader of the justice league.)

Daredevil who is very blind.

Clint Barton, ie Hawkeye, who is deaf.

Bucky Barnes who is missing an arm.

Charles Xavier who is paraplegic.

Jericho who is mute.

Captain Marvel Jr. who needs crutches.

Eddie McDonough or Hornet who has cerebral palsy.

Doctor Strange who lost a significant portion of his fine motor control on his hands.

Misty Knight, missing an arm.

Nick Fury, blind in one eye.

Cable, missing an arm and an eye.

And this is just scratching the surface. Not all who suffer are disabled and not all disabled suffer. Some of these people only become heroes because of their disabilities and it doesn’t stop them from being incredible characters that the audience cares for.

Stella Liebeck was 79 years old at the time of the incident, and the settlement helped her pay for a live-in nurse as she was partially disabled for two full years after being so badly burned she went into shock. She passed away in 2004 with little to no quality of life per her own daughter. She originally sought $20,000 dollars to cover her eight day hospital stay (including skin graphs) and compensation for her daughter's lost wages after she spent three weeks providing round-the-clock care.

Incidently, liquids served at 190 degrees is capable of causing third degree burns--which cause severe, permanent damage all the way to the muscle layer--within 3 seconds of contact with human skin. If you have a strong stomach, you can even find photographic evidence of her wounds with a quick google search. This didn't stop almost every major news outlet perpetuating MacDonald's coordinated smear campaign against her. MacDonalds' justification for this was basically, well, all fast food is hot and we have better things to worry about. Literally. This deliberately manufactured overly litigious gold digger stereotype is still remembered today via the Stella Awards, which mocks all the "frivolous" lawsuits against your favorite brands. Named after a little old lady who was permanently disfigured and handicapped from a ridiculously dangerous product.

Classy.