Dallas – A deaf couple is upset over a note that an American Airlines employee attached to one of their bags, referring to the pair as “deaf and dumb.”
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James Moehle and Angela Huckaby, of Houston, were returning home from a vacation in Hawaii when one of their bags was misplaced by the airline. When it was delivered later, a handwritten note attached to the bag read, “Please Text Deaf And Dumb.”
Moehle’s mother, Kay Moehle, told KTRK-TV in Houston that the note was “outrageous and cruel and unnecessary.” She demanded an apology.
Airline spokesman Casey Norton said Friday that the employee who wrote the note did not intend to insult anyone and will go through sensitivity training.
One of the couple’s bags was misplaced on the final leg of the couple’s journey home, from Dallas to Houston. In such cases, American uses another company to delivery late-arriving baggage to passengers.
Norton said an American employee who is not a native English speaker scrawled the note to alert a delivery driver that he should contact the couple by text message when delivering the bag.
The airline employee “will go through new respect training,” Norton said. “We are using it as a systemwide teaching example so that everybody is more respectful of those who have different impairments.”
Attempts to reach Moehle and Huckaby were not immediately successful.
They should sue the airline.
Why? What economic harm did these hillbillies cause?
He should be fired. That’s unacceptable.
I understand he wrote Deaf but what’s the Dumb for ?don’t think its funny
I do not understand what the airline employee did wrong. The basic definition of “dumb” is “destitute of the faculty of speech” (Oxford English Dictionary). The employee’s “sin” is that he knows proper English – and the ignorant masses don’t.
The literal definition of dumb is: Unable to speak usually because of deafness”. The person who wrote it was most probably unaware that in English it’s used as a slang for stupid…
“Dumb” means inability to speak. I read that term in the “Trumpet of the Swan” and then heard it used in the movie “Tommy”, Elton John was singing, “That deaf, dumb and blind kid – sure plays a mean pinball…” The Trumpet of the Swan was a good child’s book, but unless you want to see a young Jack Nicholson and Robert Daltry seventy years ago, don’t waste your time.