What can you control? Your language
In the previous issue of Worthwhile Language, I answered a reader question about feeling hopeless and bad about the world.
It’s a few weeks later, and I’m still encountering all kinds of anxiety, fear, and feelings that everything important is out of our control. (No surprise! Perfectly comprehensible responses to current events.)
One thing you can control is your language. And language has real power.
If it wasn’t powerful, it wouldn’t be under attack.
Let’s start with the ideas of the sphere of concern and the sphere of influence. In Western traditions, these date back to the stoic philosophers.
The sphere of concern holds everything you learn about the problems of the world. Sometimes these are large-scale things, like government attacks on female bodily autonomy or on immigrants. Sometimes they are smaller-scale things, like a plane crash or a public figure who turns out to be an abusive predator.
This is the stuff you see and read about on the news and in social media. It stirs up reactions, it triggers the release of stress chemicals, and it can make you feel overwhelmed and powerless.
The human brain is designed for you to only really know about 150 people, your tribe. Our modern world is at odds with our cognitive functioning.
The sphere of influence is what you can control. This is way smaller and less diverse than the sphere of concern and is generally more local and smaller scale. And for your mental health, this is where you should focus the majority of your planning, time, and energy.
Right now, in the US, there is a purposeful push to overwhelm people by generating a lot of noise and anxiety all at once around things in the sphere of concern. You hear about them, you feel overwhelmed and terrible, you feel anxious and maybe hopeless.
These are “shock and awe” tactics, here without physical bombs, and this is all by design. A passive and disengaged public is easier to manipulate.
Photo by Chelsea Pridham (via Unsplash)
Your language falls into your sphere of influence.
My six principles of optimized language* are designed to guide you to language that is as modern, strategic, and effective as possible.
What’s more, if your communications follow these principles, you are not only contributing to workplace civility (and general civility), but you are also not adding to the heavy burdens of the multiple groups of people who are under attack. The principles are:
Reflect reality.
Show respect.
Draw people in.
Incorporate other perspectives.
Prevent erasure.
Recognize pain points.
At times of crisis and disinformation, I recommend a special focus on these two principles, which go hand in hand:
1. Reflect reality.
5. Prevent erasure.
George Orwell’s 1984 is still culturally relevant to this day, and one reason is his depiction of the government-led Newspeak, a simplified and highly controlled form of English designed to shut down critical thinking. Another is the book’s painful and dangerous gap between official government statements and observable reality. WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Linguists know that Orwell’s proposal that you can’t think something if you don’t have the words for it just isn’t true.
But what is true is that language does affect our mental models, our categorization and valuation of the world, and our judgments and decisions.
So when your language is as accurate as possible and when it avoids erasing people and events (especially people and events seen as inconvenient or dangerous by people in power), it has real and positive downstream effects.
As I write, there is a US Republican Administration attack on words used in scientific inquiry. The administration has a “hit list” of banned words that cannot be used in federally funded scientific inquiry and publications, including not only the expected diversity and inequality but also terms that are foundational to defining and reporting on research. Basic sociodemographic terms such as female, women, disabilities, race and ethnicity, and gender. (Note that words such as white and men are not on the list.)
Banned word lists like these are straightforwardly fascism at work.
Researchers are going to have to find a way to comply enough so that funding for important work is not cut and still reflect the reality that they are getting new insights into. Honestly, even given the incredible flexibility and creativity of human communication, it may not be possible, and they may be abandon their research altogether.
If you are not one of these researchers, here are the three areas I recommend that you focus on:
1. Use accurate nouns and pronouns to refer to people.
The US Republican administration is on a push to deny the rights — and the very existence — of transgender people. This is not the first time such attacks have been made on the scientific and accurate representation of gender and sexual orientation.
The reality of the world is that transgender and nonbinary and intersex people exist.
While you probably can’t control the current administration’s push for transgender and nonbinary people to no longer have valid legal identification or other protections, you can still push back by using language that avoids the gender binary (such as spouse or partner instead of husband or wife), referring explicitly to transgender people when appropriate, and always using the correct pronouns to refer to everybody. This includes any and all internal and external comms for your organization.
The more power you have in your organization, the more you can use accurate language to set up organizational protections for your nonbinary and transgender employees and clients.
2. Push back at linguistic distortions.
In particular, avoid the use of and call out softening language that masks or excuses inappropriate or criminal behavior. This includes language by the government and by the media that pretends that the rule of law, constitutionality, and groups of people aren’t being threatened.
And avoid the use of and call out inflating language that puts inappropriate blame on people and suggests that they are dangerous, for example, drag queens and gay people as groomers, or immigrants or Black people as dangerous and violent criminals. This inflating language is a core part of the fascist playbook, where marginalized groups are turned into scapegoats, so it is important to push back every time.
3. Use accurate terms even if they are being banned and censored by the government
If you are not beholden to federal funding and you are not a federal employee, then you can and should use accurate terminology at all times.
12th-14th century Japanese statue of Shukongojin, the Thunderbolt God, whose holds a varja that symbolizes the power of wisdom to penetrate ignorance and destroy evil (via The Art Institute of Chicago)
You have the most control over your own language.
But you can also spend some time each week pushing back at distorted language and erasure when you encounter it. Put a comment on a social media video or post. Write to a news outlet, especially one using softening language, and call them out — or post on social media and tag them when calling them out.
Language is a collaborative project and is constantly changing due to social norms, expectations, and behaviors. By being careful with your language, both publicly and privately, and correcting inaccurate and misleading language used by others, you can make a real contribution.
If we work collectively, we can push back and define our own social norms — norms that are beyond the control of top-down government orders and edicts.
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*You may have encountered these as the “six principles of inclusive language.” And they still are. But the word inclusion can create resistance for some people who would otherwise be open to the actual principles themselves. So in an effort to be more inclusive and use language that lands well with a broader and more diverse audience, they are now called the “six principles of optimized language.”
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Dr. Suzanne Wertheim is an prominent expert on language optimization. Worthwhile provides strategic language services that guide organizations to more modern, powerful, and effective communications.