Drawing upon personal narratives, rhetoric, material discourse, discourse analysis, cultural representation, ethnography and contextual studies, this text seeks to emphasize the multi-dimensional and multi-functional nature of disability language in an attempt to further inform our understanding of disability and to locate disability more firmly within contemporary mainstream social and cultural theory. It considers such questions as: why has the discursive turn been sidelined in the development of a social theory of disability, and what has been the result of this?; and how might a social theory of disability which fully incorporates the multidimensional and multifunctional role be described?