An editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal by Roger Collier highlights the problem of Person-first language: Laudable cause, horrible prose Person-first language (or language that is person-first, as it prefers to be known) is the nice idea that rather than calling someone, say, "blind", we should call them "a person who is blind", so as to remind everyone that they're not defined by their blindness but are a person first... clever, eh? No. For one thing, it's just bad English. As Collier puts it:
"There’s a reason Ernest Hemingway didn’t call his novel The Person Who Was Male and Advanced in Years and the Sea."
He goes on to quote linguist Helena Halmari who highlights a number of problems with the approach:
In English,emphasis naturally occurs at the end of sentences... so by pushing mention of a disability or disease deeper into a sentence, adherents to person-first language may ...
