Oh dear.

[conuly]

Remember the woman who sends evidence about people who illegally park in handicapped spots?

Donovan McNabb and Jeremiah Trotter were found guilty of parking in handicapped spots. Their vehicles were photographed by Mary Ann Cottrell, who has made it her business to police the handicapped spots. I would suggest Ms. Cottrell look in the mirror before she takes another photo.

She has a handicapped license due to her caring for an adult child with autism. An individual with autism has complete mobility, and it is not necessary for them to use handicapped parking. Let those who are physically impaired use the spots, not Ms. Cottrell.

1. Stop it with the asinine phrase "adult child with autism". Just quit it.

2. You and I have no evidence that Ms. Cottrell's daughter does not, in fact, have any physical impairment.

3. Even if she did, she may still have a perfectly valid reason for using the handicapped spot - for example, if she gets lost very easily, as some people (me) do, due (I believe) to a spatial agnosia and bad sense of direction. That's for the courts to decide.

3.5 Which they already did, didn' they?

Shouldn't Ms. Cottrell be working or taking care of her handicapped kid instead of stalking the citizens of New Jersey?

I guess Ms. Cottrell didn't watch the Eagles play last season. Otherwise she would agree that McNabb definitely deserved a handicapped spot.

Humor as a defense mechanism. Never seen that one before.

Why would Donovan be so foolish as to contest a ticket for parking in a handicapped space?

He's a millionaire making more than enough to pay such a fine with the wages of an hour. Yet he brings a well-paid lawyer in to fight this fine. Why? Teammate Jeremiah Trotter isn't much better.

Exactly. He's just making himself look bad. *nodnodnod*

Three letters, two of which aren't worth the paper they're virtually printed on. *le sigh*

On a related note, about how many children under six do you have to have before a presumably non-disabling pregnancy justifies taking the handicapped spot? I'm not sure, but I think it *must* be more than just two.

Comments

daughter

[maelorin]

One's offspring is always one's child, no matter what the age.

Usually a parent would say "my daughter is unable to walk", or "my daughter has red hair". For me to say "my child is six" requires a pretty impersonal situation.

Methinks she calls her daughter her "adult child" because she want to convey the idea that her daughter is still a child to her, despite of how grown up she looks. "Adult child with autism". Not, "my daughter is autistic".

I suspect Mrs Cottrell is more autistic than I am.

Re: daughter

[mortaine.livejournal.com]

Interesting.

It's actually one of the letter-writers who uses that phrase in this linked item. Probably taken from the article, which was, my guess is, the reporter's wording (I can't remember off the top of my head if that was a direct quote from Cottrell).

My mother is always talking about how proud she is of her *children* or her daughters-- she uses them interchangeably, and I can assure you that she doesn't think we're immature in any way. It's just a word that identifies a relationship.

Dictionary.com (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=child)'s definition includes "a son or daughter: an offspring." I wouldn't normally quote this, generally agreeing that a literal dictionary definition doesn't win an argument. However, when you're talking about phrasing in a newspaper that you don't like, it's important to understand that the reporter and editor have to use two basic guides for determining if a word or phrase is appropriate-- one is the dictionary, and the other is the newspaper's style guide. Chances are, there's a note in the style guide that says to use "adult child" when talking about someone's offspring instead of "adult daughter" because "child" is gender-neutral.

I doubt you'd have a problem with "Mrs. Cottrell was tremendously proud last year when her grown child received a medical degree from Harvard Medical School." The phrase adding the negative connotation is "with autism." Perhaps it doesn't or shouldn't matter that her daughter has autism, but it seems relevant to the piece, so the reporter put it in.

I guess I'm just trying to make the opposite point, here. "Adult child" with or without autism does not have a connotation of immaturity to me. It's just a description of a particular relationship, one that's almost certainly written into the style guide as preferable to other descriptions of that relationship. If it really bugs you, write to the editors of Chicago Manual of Style and present your case for how you feel it carries a pejorative connotation. If they accept the change, within a couple of years, "adult child" will have died out in journalism.

Re: daughter

[maelorin]

I just find the construction clumsy. I guess it may just be that here in Australia we simply don't talk like that, 'tis all :)