Why It’s Important to Avoid Loaded Language
A look into how language can be used to dehumanize
Issue No. 9
You can write a book and divorce it completely from time and place. It’s much harder to do that with a newsletter. One that leans on topical events and pop culture to drive home reminders about the importance of rational thinking.
When world events unfold, as in these past two weeks, and the headline mill goes into full swing, I remind myself that we owe it to our children not to pass onto them our own biases and preconceptions. But to teach them how to think for themselves, and to look beyond a headline.
To separate emotion, dogma, tribalism, and nationalism—all qualities that muddy thinking—from rational thought. To be bold in their convictions even when it means going against the grain. To understand subtext, context, and nuance. To not fall prey to groupthink, and to the tyranny of the loudest voices. But to seek the truth and to constantly course-correct as a result of it.
This week’s issue was originally 4,000 words. I cut it down to 2,000 words late last night when I realized I wasn’t following my own advice, and had gotten too emotionally entangled with the topic at hand.
For those struggling with a feeling of helplessness, Prince’s advice in that song about Mr. Man has always worked for me—maybe we should write a letter. To yourself, to your children, to an elected official. To someone you’d like to engage with in good faith. To an audience of readers.
A very warm welcome to the 120 new subscribers who join us this week. It’s truly wonderful having you all here. (Remember, there’s a referral award you can unlock when you refer friends.)
Finally, a reading recommendation that the events of these past two weeks reminded me of. This one’s a short story called “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s one of my favorites.
Paid subscribers, you can now listen to issue no. 8 on anchoring. Thank you very much for your continued support.
In this issue, I’ll break from our tradition of covering three topics, and instead cover just the one topic—rethinking language.
Rethinking Language
Why it’s important to avoid loaded language
Dehumanization is robbing someone of the qualities that make them a human being, chief among them their dignity. In doing so, it softens the impact of any cruelties that are subsequently visited on that person. And it puts people in real, mortal danger. History has no shortage of examples of the horrors that can befall a people once they’re stripped of their dignity.
The gateway to dehumanization is language—a sea of loaded abstractions, metaphors, and images we’re born into. One we assume is a natural ally, a tool for honest self-expression. Only to discover that it can be a person’s greatest enemy.
I’d like to share a few examples of how language can dehumanize, drawing from the crisis that has recently exploded onto the world stage.
Language dehumanizes through sinister associations. In a televised meeting of a defense minister with his staff, we hear the following lines:
We are imposing a complete siege [on the city] ... There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed. We are fighting against human animals, and we are acting accordingly.
What is the image that comes to mind when one hears about a hybrid creature that’s part animal part human? A savage, a brute. The creature is an unknown quantity at the very least. The one thing such a creature almost certainly isn’t is human, like you and me. What then is an apposite way of dealing with such a creature? As the minister tells us, it’s to cut electricity, food, water, and fuel from it. To choke it into submission. The minister makes no distinction between the specific group he’s retaliating against, and the civilian population of a city.
All of the places [our enemy] is deployed, hiding and operating in that wicked city, we will turn them into rubble.
If an entire city is wicked, then the only reasonable thing to do is to rid the planet of it, one is made to think. “Level the place,” as one sitting US Senator put it during a television interview. Board it up and set it ablaze. Collective punishment serves to eliminate the image of the individual in our minds. There’s no longer a woman, say, in scrubs, heading home, greeting her family, taking off her socks, rubbing the soles of her feet. No, we instead are made to see nameless, shapeless silhouettes. Some opaque swath of wickedness.
George Takei, a week ago, touched on the dehumanizing nature of guilting by association, by drawing on the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Collective punishment is not only contrary to international law it is inhumane … It is what my community once endured in World War II, all because of the actions of others who happened to share our ethnicity.
—George Takei, Threads
In a piece on loaded words, John Simpson shares the following reminder about fact-based reporting:
We don't take sides. We don't use loaded words like “evil” or “cowardly”. Our business is to present our audiences with the facts, and let them make up their own minds.
Language dehumanizes through euphemisms. On a website aimed at educating US schools on the crisis, a line reads,
[This] conflict is rooted in a millennia-old territorial dispute.
A dispute is a spat between two sides. You say soy milk tastes good. I say oat milk tastes better. We end up in a dispute, whence a conflict might emerge. The people who objected to colonialism in the 20th century were, it’s true, trying to resolve a territorial dispute. And Patrick Henry's qualm with the British was, in essence, a territorial dispute. And the civil rights movement in America was, principally, a legal dispute. But we do a great disservice to those people when we describe their struggles as such. We omit detail that’s necessary for us to see them as human beings.
Language dehumanizes through feel-good verbs. During the past days, I’ve come across the following line in various forms:
We will cleanse the area.
Cleansing leaves you with a cleaner kitchen counter. Which is why public squares are cleansed of sit-in students, streets are cleansed of demonstrators, towns and cities are cleansed of undesirable populations. Similarly, you might hear the word purge used to the same effect. Purging suggests the elimination of something harmful or toxic. Purging institutions and government agencies sounds better than saying who was forcibly removed, for what reason, and what terrible fate befell them.
Language dehumanizes by implying things are complicated. In a press briefing, a secretary of state shares:
Some of this is, needless to say and understandably, complicated.
When a situation is made to seem complicated, that makes it easier to turn a blind eye to crimes that are later committed against a people. Destroying people’s homes isn’t justified, but when a situation is complicated, one’s told, well, maybe it is. Harming civilians, babies, the elderly, the sick, isn’t justified, but when a situation is complicated, well, maybe it is.
Language dehumanizes by implying, This is who they are. A horrific report made it into many a newspaper, onto many a TV channel, into the US president’s official remarks, and into many a LinkedIn post. A desecration of the sort I don’t wish to repeat here that impacted tens of children.
A day later, it transpired that the original source for the report was a local television reporter who had heard it from a soldier whose eyewitness testimony could not be corroborated. A journalist who was able to tour the killing fields days later shared the following:
Soldiers I spoke with yesterday didn't mention [the allegation]. The army's spokesperson stated: “We can not confirm at this point … we are aware of the heinous acts [those people are] capable of”.
Language of this sort tightly couples some quality with a group of people, suggesting the quality is necessarily inherent in them. As in, no response is given in the affirmative to whether the specific heinous act in question occurred. But, one’s told, those people might as well have done it. This is who they are, after all. This type of rhetoric aims to dehumanize. I’ve obfuscated the example; the original line mentions a specific group. But it’s all too easy to conflate one specific group with all people living in close proximity to the group, as we saw with the first two examples, and with dozens of others that I’ve come across.
And it works both ways. I’ve seen reporting that describes the other side as pure evil. Absolute monsters. The trouble with implying that any group of people is wholly made up of monsters (this is who they are) is that there’s no point from then on to try and understand anything about them. They’re monsters after all. Monsters do monster things. It’s much more useful to grasp what makes human beings, like you and me, who have families, who might head to the farmers’s market on weekends, commit or condone atrocities.
Language dehumanizes by restarting history. In a statement by a former president and, separately, by a current national security council spokesperson, we find a description of a recent attack as unprovoked.* Any phrase that starts history at the point when a story breaks doesn’t really help a person in understanding an adversary he intends to outwit, or a group of people he intends to live alongside.
When it comes to any crisis, a headline can make you mistake the spark for the powder keg, and in doing so, it can gloss over grievances that we’d be well served to get to the bottom of. Understanding a crisis’s origin and progression are a prerequisite for making informed decisions about it.
I recently started watching a show where the protagonist, a chemistry student, in defending herself against a male professor’s advance, stabs him with a pencil. Living in a misogynistic society, she is then brought into an office and asked to apologize to the professor for stabbing him. That’s precisely the dehumanizing effect restarting history can have. We only end up seeing part of the truth. In this case, the tormentor somehow became the victim, and the victim became the aggressor. And she paid a heavy price for it.
Language dehumanizes through mistruths and omissions. Partial headlines, just like other forms of propaganda, are meant to either emotionally trigger us, or emotionally mute us. They reassure us that our side is virtuous and should carry on doing what it’s doing, and that the other side isn’t, and that we ought to carry on drowning it in a sea of our cruelty and contempt.
We must, hard as it is, corroborate any news we read before accepting it or passing it on. And we must recognize that there is such a thing as emotional blackmail and that it often masquerades as impartial reporting. An anonymous, unsubstantiated source is not good enough. It leads to hyperbole and harm. I myself have been vulnerable to letting my emotions get the better of me, which is why I always fall back to reading the news when I notice that tendency, rather than scrolling through photos. We’re all flesh and bone after all.
Always seek original sources. Always ask for evidence. Always be on the lookout for conflations, for embellishments, for language that exaggerates for effect. If you read the phrase, Sources said, ask, Which sources? Was it one source or was it a bus-full? If you read a figure or a statistic, ask where it came from. Process words like they, those, and them with skepticism. If you feel like a news outlet or a talking head is playing on your emotions to maneuver you into a certain position, get your news from somewhere else.
Heaven knows it’s hard. But we try.
Until next time, be well.
—Ali
In private I observed that once in every generation, without fail, there is an episode of hysteria about the barbarians. There is no woman living along the frontier who has not dreamed of a dark barbarian hand coming from under the bed to grip her ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with visions of the barbarians carousing in his home, breaking the plates.
—J. M. Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians)
* You might notice a connection to false dilemmas here (see issue 6 for more on false dilemmas). A position that says that a massacre is either justified and provoked or heinous and unprovoked is creating a false dilemma. The truth is that the nature of a massacre has no bearing on whether it’s provoked or not—it can be unjustified, brutal, heinous … and also provoked.
Thank you Ali.