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The US Code is the official codification of US federal laws. In it, the word "lunatic" appears in a section of basic definitions, and later in a tract dealing with bank mergers.
Last month, Senators Mike Crapo, an Idaho Republican, and Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat, proposed the 21st Century Language Act, a 257-word bill that would strip the word out.
"The continued use of this pejorative term has no place in the US Code," Mr Conrad said on the Senate floor.
"'Lunatic' is an unnecessary term and... its removal will have no impact on the broader federal law."
The bill is the latest in a series of efforts in the US and Britain to strike terms for mental illness and developmental disability that are deemed antiquated and offensive from the law and from public discourse.
In the US, a 2010 act of Congress replaced "mental retardation" with "intellectual disabilities" in several places in the US Code.
Tennessee last year passed a law replacing "handicapped" with "having a disability" and "idiot, lunatic, person of unsound mind" with "person adjudicated incompetent". In 2009, the state of Maine inserted "person with alcoholism" in the place of "common drunkard" and "person who is legally incompetent" for "lunatic".
Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) wants everyone to know he’s sincerely sorry for using the word “midget” on the House floor this week.
He didn’t know that the term could be offensive. So when he went on the House floor Wednesday and used a “giants” vs. “midgets” analogy to decry Michigan’s new right-to-work law, Johnson had no clue the outrage he would spur.
“I was thinking to myself earlier today, what happens when you put in a cage fight a giant with a midget?” Johnson said then. “Well, the midget will not win the fight. I'm going to tell you that. Why? He just doesn't carry enough weight to do so. But if you put 30 midgets in with that giant, then the midgets have a chance.”
Not even 24 hours later, Johnson took to the House floor again to express his contrition.
“I had never heard of the m word … it's a word also that describes a group of people and it, at one time, has been commonly used as a descriptive term,” Johnson said Thursday afternoon. “But to my discovery, just within the last 12 hours or so, I have found that the use of the ‘midget’ — oh, excuse me, the use of the m word — is no longer socially acceptable.”
He likened his use of the “m word” to the once-common use of the “n word,” which Johnson noted used to be “socially acceptable” but is no longer.
Johnson then explained that the “m word” referred to a medical condition called dwarfism, though he expressed his preference for the term “abnormally small people” rather than dwarfism.
Turdacious
