Spastic (word)

However, the word began to be used as an insult and became a term of abuse used to imply stupidity or physical ineptness: a person who is uncoordinated or incompetent, or a fool.

Although the word has a much longer history, its derogatory use grew considerably in the 1980s and this is sometimes attributed to the BBC children's TV show Blue Peter;[6] during the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981), several episodes of Blue Peter featured a man named Joey Deacon with cerebral palsy, who was described as a "spastic".

[10][11] The current understanding of the word is well-illustrated by a BBC survey in 2003, which found that "spastic" was the second most offensive term in the UK relating to anyone with a disability.

[2] The video game Mario Party 8 features a scene of the board Shy Guy's Perplex Express where the character Kamek casts a spell to switch train cars, being "Magikoopa magic!

Benjamin Zimmer, editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press, and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Research in Cognitive Sciences, writes that by the mid-1960s the American usage of the term 'spaz' shifted from "its original sense of 'spastic or physically uncoordinated person' to something more like 'nerdy, weird, or uncool person'", all with a negative sense.

[14] In a June 2005 newsletter for American Dialect Society, Zimmer reports that the "earliest [written] occurrence of uncoordinated 'spaz' he could find" is in The Elastik Band's 1967 "undeniably tasteless, garage-rock single" – "Spazz".

[16] Both shows portrayed a "spaz" as a nerd or with potential cognitive or learning disabilities in a comic setting, reinforcing the more casual negative use of the term in the United States by using it in a popular comedy.

[13] The term still occasionally appears in North American movies or TV series, such as Friends, as a pejorative word which reflects a certain degree of casual ableism.

[17] Similarly, Rugrats: Tales from the Crib: Snow White got a PG rating based on Angelica calling Kimi "Spazzy".

[18] The difference in qualitative assessment of the term between British and American audiences is demonstrated by reactions to comments by golfer Tiger Woods after losing the US Masters Tournament in 2006.

But they were widely reported in the United Kingdom, where they caused offence and were condemned by a representative of Scope and Tanni Grey-Thompson, a prominent paralympian.

This did not stop vocal British fans from alerting various news outlets, eventually resulting in the name being changed for all markets to the less-offensive "Over-Run".

The company stated "As soon as we were made aware of the issue we stopped distribution of the product and are now working with retailers to pull the game off the market.