Did Tennessee Williams make a slip in having Amanda say Laura is “crippled”?

In the most of literal senses, I would say that Williams
did not make an error in having Amanda state that Laura is "crippled."  Given the time
in which Williams is writing, the term was used quite often.  This doesn't make it right
or appropriate, but by those social order's standards, it was accepted.  This is
something that we see quite often in that the level of verbal and social sensitivity in
the modern setting is more heightened than it was in the past.  It becomes a challenge
to apply these standards to writers of the past.  Certainly individuals have all the
rights to be able to say that Williams should have used more sensitivity than he showed.
 (I still say that he gets a pass because he showed more sensitivity than most to the
weaknesses of human beings.)  Yet, in the time in which he is writing, to have Amanda
refer to Laura as "crippled" does make sense.  It's difficult to see what Amanda would
have said about Laura in the modern setting because if we changed this element, the
entire emotional timbre of the play changes.  This is what makes Williams' work so
profound.  Change one element and it leads to other changes.  Call it the literary
"butterfly effect."

In a more symbolic sense, I would say
that Williams did exactly the right thing in having Amanda say Laura is "crippled."  For
someone like Amanda, they would see Laura as somehow deficient.  Amanda is gregarious,
willing to construct her sense of self in a public manner that reconfigures her past in
a nostalgic light.  She is the type of individual that is not going to be at her best in
trying to work with someone as Laura.  She is not going to be emotionally sensitive
enough to be able to see her as unique in her own light.  Laura is nowhere near like
Amanda.  It fits her characterization to see Amanda as labeling her own daughter as
"crippled" in her state of being that is not like her mother's.  We can debate the use
of language, but I think that given the point the Williams might have been trying to
make about Amanda's character, he got it right.