The difference in understanding of the term between British and American audiences was highlighted by an incident with the golfer Tiger Woods; after losing the US Masters Tournament in 2006, he said, "I was so in control from tee to green, the best I've played for years... But as soon as I got on the green I was a spaz."
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But they were widely reported in Britain, where they caused offence and were condemned by a representative of Scope and Tanni Grey-Thompson, a prominent paralympian.
:Bruce Burgess, a 24-year-old, spastic since birth and Graeme Dingle, a well-known mountaineer, climb Mt Ruapehu together.
Named in honour of William Little, the English surgeon who described what became known as 'Little's disease', a spastic paralysis of both lower limbs which then became known as infantile cerebral palsy.
Gibbs bequeathed the copyright from the designs of her bush characters and her stories to Northcott Disability Services (formerly The NSW Society for Crippled Children) and Cerebral Palsy Alliance (formerly The Spastic Centre of NSW).
In 1894, Eugène Devic and his PhD student Fernand Gault described 16 patients who had lost vision in one or both eyes and within weeks developed severe spastic weakness of the limbs, loss of sensation and often bladder control.
His best-known role was spastic exchange student Long Duk Dong in the 1984 film Sixteen Candles.
Originally used in the treatment of spastic children, the technique is now used on babies and adults.