An Awkward Companion: Disability and the Semantic Landscape of English Lame

Abstract

This article proposes a history of the English word lame, based on quantitative and qualitative evidence from twentieth-century corpora. A path of semantic development is proposed for lame in the twentieth century, from concrete contexts with animate referents to abstract contexts with inanimate referents and abstract contexts with human referents. While lame does participate in the universal tendencies of semantic generalization and subjectification, its participation in contextual generalization is skewed by the strong discursive power of its most common concrete use, human disability. It is suggested that the abstract meanings of lame are the result of the crystallization of frequently occurring inferences surrounding human impairment and disability.