‘They should ask me. I’m a complete cripple,’ said my husband, heaving himself from his chair with great determination to reach the whisky. The Department for Transport is asking disabled people whether the term invalid carriage in legislation should be changed and what term they might prefer. ‘Language has moved on and changed,’ the government says, since 1970, when legislation was drafted.
One problem is having to keep changing terminology. No one, even my husband, should be called a cripple. No one should be called handicapped. Now no one should be called disabled, but rather a person with a disability. These changes are paralleled in the languages of our neighbours. The Paris Métro had seats reserved for mutilés de guerre. The term was replaced by personnes handicapées. Now these are said to be en situation de handicap. But in Paris it is impossible to overlook the 350ft-high dome of Les Invalides, where Napoleon and other heroes are buried. It was founded by Louis XIV in 1670 for old soldiers – invalides.
Invalid had then been in use in England for about 40 years. Both meanings, ‘not valid’ and ‘disabled’, derived from the Latin invalidus ‘not strong’, and both senses were at first pronounced in the same way, with the stress on the second syllable. It was the practice in the British Army to employ invalids in garrison duties. In 1808 intrepid travellers to Lerwick in Shetland would have been able to read in Robert Forsyth’s new Beauties of Scotland that ‘Fort Charlotte is garrisoned by a small detachment of invalids’.
So invalid was a respectful word in the military context. Just as Hackney carriages found their way into Acts of Parliament and stayed, so invalid carriages featured in the Use of Invalid Carriages on Highways Regulations 1970, superseded in 1988, even when people used for them the unlovely name of mobility scooters.
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