the.com/blindness
Blindness is the partial or total loss of sight, present from birth or acquired through injury or disease.
means The partial or total loss of sight, whether from birth, injury, or disease.
from From Old English 'blind,' a word Germanic languages share in common (German 'blind,' Dutch 'blind,' Old Norse 'blindr'), traced back to a prehistoric Germanic root meaning 'to deceive' or 'obscure' — itself likely tangled up with an ancient Indo-European root for 'dim' or 'blur.' The '-ness' is just the ordinary suffix that turns a quality into a noun, the same one that gives us 'kindness' or 'darkness.' So the word has always carried a double sense baked in: not seeing, and being deceived or left in the dark — sight and deception sharing one ancient root.
- not just dark
- many see gray static or nothing, not black
- brain rewires
- visual cortex repurposed for touch and sound
- leading cause
- cataracts, globally, and they are treatable
- echolocation works
- some blind people navigate by clicking tongues