That’s What She Said
Lately there has been a bit of controversy over the naming of a certain global epidemiological event. In the interest of dodging automods, which are especially quick on the banhammer these days, I won’t refer to it directly. You all know what I’m talking about. That one.
The president calls it a certain thing. This happens to contravene WHO guidelines, but those guidelines are spreading a certain amount of false information themselves, so really WHO’s to say? The naming guidelines are not particularly important to me (when I’m not using euphemisms I just call it after the beer) but, interestingly, it’s very important to a lot of other people. It’s certainly important to the president, who makes sure to use his preferred terminology at least five times per press conference. A lot of the emergent discourse has been predictable: “why does it matter what we call it? Just call it [my preferred term].” “Here’s why it matters what we call it: [my preferred term] is objective and others aren’t.”
The fact that powerful people are fighting over it means it must be important, so let’s talk about it. Why does it matter what we call it? Why does it matter what we call anything? If words are just signifiers defined by signifiers defined by signifiers all the way down then for what purpose all this controversy? The words we use, as top-level signifiers, should shift to reflect the consensus reality behind them, right?
Wrong. Language is not a global summit, where everyone gets together and agrees what we’re all going to mean when we say “flu”, it’s a battlefield, where people strive to impose their patterns of thought on each other. One powerful way of doing this is by abusing connotations — semantic tectonics, the denotative layer slipping over the connotative. Implicit in the fact that people fight over terminology at all is the fact that people can’t control what connotations they associate with words. It is too late to divorce the tokens from their meanings. Word meanings are not exclusive, they are additive. When you start using an old word for a new thing, it carries the implication of the old meaning, and also carries back the implication of the new meaning to the old usage.
Thus, the hypocritical semantic judo: it doesn’t matter what we call it, so start calling it what I want you to call it. On the one hand they will claim that words have no intrinsic meaning so the shift should not matter to you. On the other hand they will claim it is especially important to attach this certain definition to that certain word, specifically. All people will do this intuitively.
This goes beyond just dictionary shuffling. George Carlin’s shell-shock bit is a good example — the sonic feel of the words, the effect of greater syllables, the blankness of abstract vocabulary as opposed to visual, all contribute to soften our impression of shell-shock/PTSD. The semantic drift took it out of the battleground and into a psychiatrist’s office. No longer is a soldier the premier authority on what it’s like to suffer mental trauma in the field, now a shrink gets that final word, which is, of course, why they changed the terminology in the first place.
Everyone has an agenda, and they push that agenda through language. The fights over “undocumented” vs. “illegal”, “sex” vs. “gender”, “soda” vs. “pop”, all stem from two different groups of people with two different agendas using different language to refer to the same thing with different intents. They become fights if/when one or more groups begin demanding everyone follow their own standards. By putting your words in someone else’s mouth you can control the implications behind what they say even if they speak against you. Conversely, if you use your enemy’s linguistics, you spread their gospel despite yourself. The New York Times sets certain editorial guidelines for what language to use when discussing various topics, guidelines which then filter down to other institutions and to anyone who takes NYT as a language authority. I’ve seen inflection points in national discourse defined by the moment NYT updates their style guide.
But why stop there? This manipulation of the public language for the purpose of controlling people’s minds goes all the way to the top — that’s right, I’m talking about the Modern Language Association. The MLA gets its claws into you from the moment you start learning English, no one can escape their grasp. The MLA is possibly the single most powerful institution in the United States. They define not just the vocabulary you use, but the syntax; they control not what you think, but how. All of but this one, sentences in this essay controlled from MLA. I am not safe. Neither are you.
The MLA’s insidious influence can be felt, for example, in the writing of bibliographies: who tells you that it is important to credit the publisher of a book, who had no hand in writing its contents? The MLA sticks its greasy thumb into your feelings for your most intimate acquaintances: who tells you that you should never use the “antiquated” thou and must always address everyone with the formal/plural you? And who is citing their own precedent as a “natural” evolution of the language to explain a “natural” evolution of the pronoun they from a plural into a singular?
To be clear, I have no culture war grievances with the MLA — I use the singular they all the time. My point is that there can’t be any such thing as natural evolution in a language which is determined by a central committee. The very existence of the MLA belies its pretensions to impartiality, like a quantum scientist claiming they’re “just watching”. The partialities of the human members of the MLA aggregate to become the partialities of the MLA itself, and inevitably some of those partialities will all stack in a certain direction. This becomes a bias in the MLA and, from there, a bias in the English language.
My point is that it is impossible to escape the influence of other people’s biases on your own thinking. It is impossible to escape other people at all. There is no such thing as a singular human being, or a personal choice, even in speech, especially in speech. Everything you do in the presence of others has an impact on those others. The more authority you accrete to your name, the greater your influence, and the more people will seek to influence you in turn.
This is not a call to responsibility — so few people would heed that call that it would do no one any good and would only do them harm. So instead, take this as a friendly tap on the shoulder, a reminder of the power and weakness that you have in equal measures. Once you recognize your tools you can make good use of them: I spent the first part of this post talking about a disease I never once explicitly named, just to make this point. Language is not about expressing yourself clearly, it is about manifesting the thoughts you want in the minds of those who hear you. Facetiously, this is a form of mind control. Do with this understanding what you will.
