Mocking Hearing Inpaired

[ShockMe]

To be quite shocked that after a member of the public had posted that they had found a hearing aid and hoped to re-unite it with it's owner.. Our local school's SEN teacher commented 'Pardon?'

I've refrained from saying I hate the word hearing impaired because I understand the OP is trying to be PC

But yes. I am not impaired. I am deaf

That is my ignorance. I am sorry, I had no idea that could be offensive. I have a friend who works in schools with children who have different levels of hearing because of illness, accident, hereditary loss etc and I assumed that was the correct phrase to cover all rather than just 'deaf' which to me felt like 100% no hearing. Thank you for picking this up for me. What is the most acceptable word/language to use?

Well everyone has their own phrase but deaf is usually fine. Or hard of hearing

No probs. Generally the more accepted terms these days are Deaf, deaf, deafened and hard of hearing. Deaf organisations tend to use "deaf" to cover the full spectrum.

Deaf with a capital D in the middle of a sentence refers to BSL users.

I hate it when I quietly explain to people that I need to look them in the face when they talk as I am obviously very embarrassed about not being able to follow a conversation and they reply with 'pardon' and then laugh like a drain at their own hilarity.
Deafness is the loneliest disability and to be laughed at is not in the slightest bit helping.
I do not see other disabilities laughed at to people's face.

How's this for ignorance?

My audiologist used to have his head down, hand covering mouth, writing notes whilst asking questions.

He always got irritated if I kept asking him to repeat the question

You would have thought he would have more common sense than that.

I requested a new one after thatv

Wonder if there was a reason he did that Need?

It's not like you can pretend to be deaf as the tests prove it.

I had an operation on my ear recently to help me with my deafness and my own brother actually accused me of not actually being deaf

You haven't offended me at all. I don't like the term. As I've said before I'm not impaired. Just deaf

But I can't say if anyone else is offended or not

No. He had no reason to do it. He was just inconsiderate.

Think he was in the wrong job Need, he obviously found deaf people very annoying.

Yep. Haven't seen him in years so I don't know if he still does the job or not

I hate it when I quietly explain to people that I need to look them in the face when they talk as I am obviously very embarrassed about not being able to follow a conversation and they reply with 'pardon' and then laugh like a drain at their own hilarity

You need to stop with the quietly explaining. You're deaf, if they can't handle that they need to sort it out. Why are you embarrassed? I can't imagine someone blind being embarrassed.

The two I see now are lovely. Still have a bad habit of trying to speak whilst I have ear putty in to make a new hearing aid mould but they apologise as soon as my hearing aid is in. I think it's because a lot of people they see can hear albeit not much from both ears.

Since I can only hear from one and once I've got the putty in, I can't hear anything at all, they forget

It depends who's doing the ridiculing.

A woman I knew years ago had a blue badge and walked with a stick and she referred to them as a cripple stick and a cripple sticker. So did her husband and sons. It was her mannerism, her disability and who am I to criticise her way of making light of her disability? She also joked it always got her a good parking spot at Bakewell Show. She never used the terms about other people, just herself.

I'm deaf, I wear glasses, I have bipolar and borderline personality disorder, I can't spell, I can't say certain words - it's my way and my husband and children's way to make light of a difficult situation about something very personal to me, but I can't judge someone else for taking offense or not taking offense about something said. My husband calling me deaf, blind and daft is very different to a random person calling me that, but it also depends on context.