Article: Words: Person

THE GOVERNMENT has just launched a campaign to make everyone feel more kindly towards the disabled. "See the person, not the disability" is its message, and quite right too. But there really ought to be a better word than person for what the campaign is saying here. For the funny thing about person is how impersonal it is.

A persona in Latin was a mask, as worn by actors (hence dramatis personae), which meant that a person was not a real person at all, and was only impersonating someone else; Shakespeare, for example, uses it in this sense. Meanwhile other people talked about "a person" simply to mean someone who wasn't an animal. There wasn't much individuality about it. By the end of the ...

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