A question of terminology

If you have stumbled upon my blog while surfing, please tell me what terminology you used to find your way here.

My first problem when setting up this blog was finding a short, descriptive name for it to match my objective. I don't want to be writing some long-winded explanation a zillion times if there's a simple term that I can use.

Deafness is plagued with horrible clumsy terminology. Maybe I find it horrible only because it is so personal. Who knows?

Every time I write "hearing aid" I cringe. If Apple made a hearing aid, would they call it a hearing aid? I'm pretty sure that they'd call it something funky and cool like an "iHear".

When I started school, I wore hearing aids but no-one had ever used the term "deaf" in front of me before. So when kids with lisps started asking me "Are you death?" I was mighty confused. Thankfully my classmates stopped asking when I stopped wearing the black cloak and scythe to school. I don't like the word deaf. Nor do I like the many replacements such as hearing impaired, hard of hearing, etc. Someone smarter than me should come up with some more agreeable terms!

Other people are also trying to program/explore/configure their own hearing aids and the most common terms being used here on the web seem to be "user programmable" and "consumer programmable". Neither term is entirely satisfactory.

"User" isn't god-awful but I just don't think of myself as a user. Hearing aids are in some ways like parasites which cling to my body, use me and suck all the happy juices out of me. I don't want to "use" my hearing aids. I want to put them on, turn them on, and be so happy with what I hear that I just forget they're there.

"Consumer" is not a particularly good substitution for user although it sounds better in marketing speak. We do not eat or consume hearing aids. If by some curious chance you do eat hearing aids, I'd love to hear from you! There must be a reason why they print "May be harmful if swallowed" on the battery packs. Depending on where we live, a large proportion of us do not buy our hearing aids either. Let's leave the word consumer for consumables such as food and toilet paper.

My full venom is reserved for "programmable". That word conjures up nightmarish visions of geeky people, staying up through the night, writing new lines of code for their hearing aids. Hell would be where a doddery old lady suddenly exclaims "Hey, I've just created a babelfish application!". I don't want to be a geek. I don't want to spend every waking moment tweaking the original subroutines. I just want to be able to set up and configure my hearing aids and then leave them well alone.

For the moment I have settled on "User configurable" although I would prefer something a little closer to "User explorable" which allows people to simply find out what is possible without implying that they make the final settings.

Until further notice I plan to use the abbreviation "TOUCH" (TOwards User-Configurable Hearing) as the name of this project. Of course, this isn't perfect either. We have five senses (or six if you're lucky...) and I will stand accused of mixing one with another. But, as I said, I've never liked the clumsy terminology of deafness. So I don't see why you should either. :-)