A different way of looking at this is this: "Diasbled" is descriptive; "Handicapped" is judgemental.
I would say only because you've been told/taught/browbeaten into perceiving it as such. There's nothing essentially judgemental in the words handicap or handicapped - "
SWMBO never having learned to drive is sometimes a handicap", "
I'm handicapped by being a fat old man when it comes to chasing young scallywags off my lawn".
It having become an "offensive" term to use was, I believe, entirely driven by the kind of people we've been talking about, the 'right on', 'look at me I'm so good, can't you see' crowd. Its general usage has always been descriptive, not judgemental. I have never, ever, heard someone use 'handicapped' offensively, except people who would still sound equally offensive if they constructed the exact same sentence with the word 'disabled' substituted. When you consider the other use of 'handicap', to deliberately place a burden on someone to reduce their performance, as in golf or horse racing, it becomes ironic to quasi-ban it because it's also aptly descriptive of the unnecessary burdens that society often places on disabled people, we handicap them. Anyone who has had to watch a disabled friend go through a government disability benefit assessment, or been out with a friend in a wheelchair and discovered that public transport that is mandated to be wheelchair accessible by law still isn't, will know exactly what I mean by that.
I could even argue for 'disabled' being more potentially offensive. There was a standing joke at university about the 'disabled toilet' in the SU building; given that it was frequently in sorry disrepair and incapable of performing the function of a toilet there was a
double entendre that the disabled toilet was also a
disabled toilet. What does that make a
disabled person, incapable of functioning as a person?
Technically I'm "disabled". I have asthma, and it restricts some things that I can do, and it's led to me spending more time in a hospital bed than I care to remember. If somebody asked inappropriate questions at a job interview and denied me a job because of it I could legitimately bring a case against them under the Disability Discrimination Act. I don't think of myself as disabled, I still function, and I might well take umbridge at someone telling me I'm disabled. It carries a connotation of 'not working', "The mains supply to Specmaster's house has been disabled until the water leak has been fixed". Whereas if someone said that my asthma handicapped me, I wouldn't disagree - it means there are things that I cannot do, but not that I've been disabled, turned off, only fit to be put out to pasture*. I'd differentiate between saying someone
has a disability (neutral) and saying that someone
has been disabled, or
is disabled (both capable of carrying the meaning that I'm saying is potentially offensive).
There
are words that were once neutral and have become genuinely offensive but I don't think 'handicapped' was ever one of them. The "Spastics Society" was a charity that worked to help people with cerebral palsy. By my school days "spastic" had become a term of general abuse - one of my schoolfriends, Jimmy, was very fond of calling people "spaz" or "spazes". There's no doubt of the deliberate offense being generated there. The "Spastics Society" is now called "Scope".
I'm quite happy to follow fashion and call people "disabled" if only because there are some "disabled" people who have been taught to take the word as indicating intended offense, but it is a fashion, judgemental or offensive intent is not innate to the word 'handicapped'.
* Some may disagree on that particular point.
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