The pitfalls of language
Earlier today I noticed a controversy breaking around the story of asylum seekers in Cardiff being issued with coloured wristbands to show their entitlement to food at a nearby center. Twitter instantly went into outrage mode, as it does so readily…and before too long pictures of yellow stars were being tweeted by way of comparison. The latter seems especially insensitive, in the same week as Holocaust Memorial Day. The infamous yellow stars issued in Nazi Germany had nothing whatsoever to do with entitlement or food parcels.
It is now over a quarter of a century since Dwight Bolinger wrote his fascinating book ‘language: the loaded weapon’. In it, he examines how easily we are swayed by the emotive use of language. He cites an experiment where 150 viewers were shown the same footage of a road accident. Those who were asked how fast the cars were going when they ‘hit’ answered with a slower average speed than those who were asked how fast they were going when they ‘smashed’. Language skews our perception.
Now consider the headline below:
The rights or wrongs of the scheme (now abandoned) are not the issue here. Re-read the quote above, supplanting the words ‘forced to’ with’ ‘given’ , ‘issued’ or even ‘required to’ and see how differently it reads. With tensions running high, the need to carefully choose our words has never been greater.