ABSTRACT
I remember a primary school teacher (fortunately, not so many teachers are like that) who, complaining about the difficult circumstances of her work, referred to her class as composed of ‘twenty-five children and a handicapped’, using the term as a noun rather than an adjective. The term handicap has survived for almost two centuries within horse racing, before being used first in specialized language and later in common language to define, according to the Zingarelli dictionary, an ‘incapability to provide by oneself, entirely or partially, the normal necessities of the individual and social life, determined by a deficiency, congenital or acquired, physics or psychic [. . .] and having individual, family and social consequences’. If life is a race, then many have as their lot some limitations that don’t allow them to reach the finishing line. This associative thread fits well with a standpoint that recognizes the problem rather than the person, or identifies the person with the problem. In the English language, from which the term was born, the word handicap is no longer in use, as it evokes, rather than ‘hand in cap’ (which refers to an ancient game that nobody quite remembers any more), ‘cap in hand’, reminding us of the
pathetic figures of afflicted people and beggars that, from the Beggar’s Opera to Dickens, populated English literature.
