Acceptable synonyms for "Little People," and the movie Foul Play

Factual Questions
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I just saw Foul Play on TV recently, and I hadn’t seen it since I was in Jr. high when it was first in theaters, so, loooooong time ago.

In it (and this is not a spoiler) Goldie Hawn’s character, Gloria Mundy is told to “Beware the Dwarf.”

I am not an expert, but I am somewhat aware on the community of Little People in the US-- enough to know that they prefer to be called “Little People,” and don’t especially like “dwarf” as a common term, but accept it as a clinical diagnosis.

At one point in the movie, Gloria’s landlord, played by Burgess Meredith, paraphrases the warning, and says something like “Look out for the -------!” The last word is bleeped out. My memory at 57 of a film I saw around 11 or 12 is that he said “midget,” but I wouldn’t bank on a 45-year-old memory.

However, I’m more interested in why it was bleeped. I know Little People object to it, on several grounds, its often being used inaccurately among them, but I was not aware that organized Little People objected strongly enough to get a 45-yr-old movie censored-- maybe get the word changed for a new film, but snipped from an old one?

Or maybe I’m remembering wrong, and the word was not “midget,” but something more volatile.

Anyone know for certain?

2

It was midget.

3

According to IMDb, it’s actually “midgets,” plural. Meredith’s character then says “they’re taking over the world.” Perhaps it wouldn’t have been bleeped, were it not for the sinister, dehumanizing implications of the second line.

4

I had to deal with the question of how to describe a Little Person when I wrote about a famous one in my book Lost Wonderland.
Alize Espiridiona Cenda del Castillo, who performed professionally as Chiquita would have been described as a “midget” when i was a kid, because she was proportionally small (whereas “dwarf” was used to refer to someone with small limbs and a larger torso. Both terms are avoided today. “Midget”, I’ve been told, is associated with “midge”, as in the diminutive fly, and is seen as pejorative.

So what should I call Chiquita in my book? I quoted her own press release:

She spoke Italian, Spanish, and English, played instruments, and was supposed to be a great wit. Her Wikipedia entry says she was Cuban, but she was more likely born in Mexico. She was also the center of a cause celebre when she eloped with a musician, was forcibly re-captured by her exhibitor, then the pair escaped again and struck out on their own.

5

It’s generally the case that today’s technical term becomes tomorrow’s slur. I can think of numerous examples I won’t say here.

6

Forget the Little People, beware that python that laughed when the film was destroyed.

Gotta love Scrabble.

7

Yes things evolve.

I don’t have anyone in my life that I can ask but it seems to me that dwarf isn’t really frowned upon by those that have dwarfism as long as it’s a descriptor for their medical condition and not used as a label.

8

I seem to remember, long before Little Person became the accepted term, that “midget” was usually used to refer to a short person of proportionate dimensions (i.e. the relative size of their torso and limbs were similar to those of a taller person) and “dwarf” was used to refer to a person whose limbs were out of proportion to their torso.

9

In a case of “you can’t please everybody”, I saw an interview of a little person where he said he preferred the term dwarf. I couldn’t help laughing.

10

Like Sandra Dee the girl midget (Gidget). Which, on reflection, was an intended pejorative in 1959.

11

I knew a woman that once said “I am not Black, I am a lovely shade of Mocha”.

But there is the “official” info on this
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https://www.lpaonline.org/faq-#:~:text=Such%20terms%20as%20dwarf%2C%20little,name%20than%20by%20a%20label.
Such terms as dwarf, little person, LP, and person of short stature are all acceptable, but most people would rather be referred to by their name than by a label.

12

Look up to my post where I stated this three hours earlier

13

My apologies; I don’t know how I missed that. I plead temporary insanity due to a caffeine deficiency.

14

It happens to us all.

Sorry if I was short with you.

15

We see what you did there.

16

That is true, and I think I mentioned it in my OP, but I probably wasn’t clear. I may have posted that at midnight.

Actually, it’s a finger/thumb thing-- all midgets were dwarves, but not all dwarves were midgets.

The modern term for “midget” is “pituitary dwarf,” and if you are following along in your text, you’ll figure out that pituitary dwarfism mostly no longer exists, because people deficient in human growth hormone can take injections of an artificial one, and grow to the size their genes dictate. I actually wonder if that might be one objection to it. A lot of Little People contributed to-- and a few made great sacrifices-- to find a cure. So that makes midget a sort of erasure of that.

People treated for pituitary dwarfism don’t become giants, and you can’t pick them out from a crowd-- they end up about the same height as their siblings, because the treatment has been around a long time, and the dosage is calculated very accurately.

Actually, I guess it’s inaccurate to say that pituitary dwarfism no longer exists-- it gets diagnosed every day-- but the treatment is so effective, it can be called a cure.

I wonder if it might even be more common now than it used to be, because chemotherapy usually destroys the ability of the body to release HGH, and so children who recover from cancers may only grow two or three more inches after effective cancer treatment.

Since such children did not typically survive to adulthood until about the 1970s or 80s, with greater percentages surviving every decade since, but surviving with acquired dwarfism, maybe that actually has made it more common.

I know a guy who had this-- he was diagnosed at 8 with leukemia, and pronounced cured at 15, at which time, he looked about 11. Grew so fast after that, you barely recognized him from week to week.

I can see I’ve gone way off-topic-- but it is my thread.

I’ll stop now.

17

The term of art is “euphemism treadmill.”

18

Yes. Some more mild examples - “Special” has become a schoolyard insult. I got reamed by someone a few years ago for “Oriental” which I had never realized before then was considered offensive by some. (“South Asian” and “East Asian” seem very contrived, and of course “Indian” as a south Asian has it’s own problems, the obvious being not everyone from that area is from India, etc. Is Indonesia South or East or southeast Asian?)

I recall watching the Olympics in Sydney on TV. The announcer described one (American) swimmer as a “Chinaman” then after the next commercial break came on to present a grovelling apology for the term - I’m guessing no-one had told him that before.

Part of it is minorities taking offense at even what was official names due to past use, and part of it is others using the official terms with the appropriate tone to turn them into insults.

My understanding is that classical dwarfism is a genetic abnormality, and it results in the small limbs and hip shape. Unlike HGH therapy, there’s not much that can be done about it yet.

19

I must be getting punked by the Mandela effect, because my memory of that scene is different. The landlord (iirc) was somewhat dismissively recapping Gloria’s narrative back to her, and quoted the warning as “Look out for the elf!”

Which I don’t really understand why they would have bleeped that word. It really made the line hilarious in his gentle Irish brogue.

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