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

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