Tiger Woods did, and Britons are outraged. And Americans are confused and outraged, even the PC kind.

Growing up in the USA, my friends and I always said, “Don’t have a spaz!” Never connected it to a disabled person — it was a ‘nerd’ word, like ‘dork’. Then I got to Australia and found that it was used in all seriousness to describe people who suffer from uncontrollable muscular spasms. I even seem to remember a ‘Spastic Society’ in Australia. I was horrified — I’d been using the word ‘spaz’ without knowing what I’d been referring to, and also because… shouldn’t they call them something else?

So now I’m watching the Tiger flap unfold. British folks are (incorrectly) assuming that Americans are mocking the disabled, and Americans are incensed to find themselves attacked. Such is the danger of semantic shift in cross-cultural communication.

Linguistics offers no answer to what people ‘should’ do. It’s just going to have to sort itself out. But from an interpersonal standpoint, I am dismayed by the ferocity of the reaction of many Americans (see here for a typical sample).

Do these people react that way to their partners or their children when there’s a conflict? And is that likely to lead to a solution?

One measure of a person’s humanity shows in how they react when confronted by someone who feels wronged by them. Do they a) listen and try to understand the problem? or b) act annoyed and say there isn’t really a problem, and you’re just being stupid?

Yeah, call me a PC idiot for trying to understand other people’s gripes. I know it takes more time, but I’ve actually learned things that way. The opposite approach looks like supreme discourtesy. A real lack of care. Far worse than an accidental epithet.