Have you ever seen someone with crutches and called them a cripple just to be shushed by your mother and told it’s rude and the correct term is handicapped? Well for many, they prefer the term, handicapped, because it makes them feel still of use versus deformed or broken, but for Nancy Mairs, she proudly uses the negative term, cripple, quite affirmatively. Handicapped infers restrictions to one’s ability to function physically, mentally, or socially, but Nancy indulgences the wincing of others and her ability to “face the brutal truth of her existence squarely.”
Within Nancy Mairs’ passage, she explains her reasoning for repeatedly using the feared word “cripple” through interesting rhetorical features such as tone, word choice, and rhetorical