Wheelchair vocabulary

[cjsmith]

I need vocabulary!

The person not in a wheelchair "walks"; the person in a wheelchair ___________ (rides, wheels, rolls, ???).
A person in a wheelchair is a ______________ (wheelchair user, ???).
A short word for a wheelchair is ______________ (???).
The act of controlling and steering a wheelchair is called ________________ (driving, steering, wheeling, ???).

I'm half tempted to say "wheelie" for just about all of these. I wheelie, you wheelie, he/she/it wheelies. (Or maybe just I wheel, etc.) I am a wheelie, I got my wheelie out of the car, I'm wheelie-ing (wheeliing? why not, "skiing" gets away with the double i). Tempting as it is, however, I couldn't possibly, you see. It would be silly.

Comments

non-wheelchair using copyeditor here

[redbird]

I don't use a wheelchair, but I'll play anyway:

1: wheels or rides (the former if the person is it's muscle-powered and the person using the chair is providing that power; the latter for a powered chair or one pushed by someone else).
2: wheelchair user
3: chair
4: steering or wheeling feels best.

I'd also be a little careful, if the chair is being pushed by someone else: "pushed Chris's wheelchair" is better than "pushed Chris", though "the nurse wheeled my cousin down to the OR" is also reasonable.

I don't know how much distinction there is in usage between someone who uses a wheelchair longterm and someone who is using one temporarily or briefly: the hospital patient in the example above, or someone who ordinarily uses a cane or walker but is being pushed through an airport in a wheelchair.

And there's the usage I warned about a paragraph earlier, but "in a wheelchair" feels appropriate in that context and seems to call for that verb.