Negative and patronizing language produces negative and patronizing images. Words are important and teachers in particular must make sure that words do not offend or reinforce negative stereotypes. Language can be used to shape ideas, perceptions and attitudes. Words that are in popular use reflect prevailing attitudes in society. Those attitudes are often the most difficult obstacles to change. However, positive and respectful attitudes can be shaped through careful use of words that objectively explain and inform without judgemental implications. Words like impairment, disability and handicap are often used interchangeable. The World Health Organisation (WHO) carefully defines these three words (See box), but has in the meantime decided that these are no longer acceptable in terms of human rights and respect for difference and diversity. Disability is now seen as a complex collection of conditions, many of which are created by the social environment. Hence the management of the problem requires social action, and it is the collective responsibility of society at large to make the environmental modification necessary for the full participation of children and adults with disabilities in all areas of life. The issue is therefore an attitudinal or ideological one requiring social change, which at the political level becomes a question of human rights. When talking about persons with a disability people often use words or labels that imply a negative judgement. People say that persons are disabled, are deaf or are mentally retarded as if that is their only characteristic. Persons are not impaired, disabled or handicapped, but they may have an impairment, disability or handicap as one of their many other characteristics. Talking about “the handicapped”, “the disabled”, “the deaf” is rather insulting and hurtful to a person’s dignity. It devalues individual people and labels them in one big group perceived as being the same or similar, reinforcing stereotyping. Such labels focus primarily on the disability and not on the person. “Mental retardation” is another negative label, which hurts the person in question as well as his/her family members. It is preferred to use the term “intellectual disability” instead of mental retardation. New terminology like PWDs (Persons With Disability), CWDs (Children with Disability), PALs (Persons Affected by Leprosy) is as demeaning as earlier used labels. Real people should not be made into acronyms. We are not using acronyms for any group of people and should not do so for people with a disability. It is important to realize that diversity among people is normal and that within the different categories of disabilities people differ as much from each other as within other groups of people. A teacher may have two children with visual impairments in his/her classroom that require very different teaching approaches due to such normal diversity among people with and without disabilities.