by Victoria Ann Lewis

About Victoria Ann Lewis

Victoria Ann Lewis is Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Redlands in southern California and was the founder and Director of the Other Voices Project at the Mark Taper Forum from 1982 to 2002. She is the editor of Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights (2006). Her work has appeared in The Politics of American Actor Training (2011) and A History of Collective Creation (2013).

Crip

book Keywords for Disability Studies

“Crip” is the shortened, informal form of the word “cripple.” One finds it in slang usage by the early twentieth century, often in the underworld language associated with begging—such as “he was a phony crip.” The word also occurs as a nickname based on a defining physical characteristic, such as the novelist Owen Wister’s 1893 reference to a lame character shot in the leg as Crip Jones (“Crip” 1994, 522). During the 1920s, “crip” became a slang synonym for “easy,” both in sports and in collegiate registers: a “baseball crip” was an easy pitch, while a “crip course” was an easy course in school. These usages reflect the low social expectations held for people with disabilities, as in the phrase “to give someone the cripple’s inch.”