There’s a saying about the public arena: “control the vocabulary and you control the debate.” Words frame the issue; they are the vehicle for meaning and emotion. Some words are incendiary. Some words are empathetic.
Consider how often issues are framed with that polarized framework, an over-simplified model that positions people at extremes.
I've heard that a single offensive word can render an entire book invisible!"
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.
By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.
Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning...
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.
Words and meaning have almost parted company.
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood.
If you want to create awareness and motivation for change—change the language. Create credible measures that align with the fundamental mission of the organization and people will have a hard time resisting their effect.
The more you amplify your adjectives, the more you erode even the possibility of coming to common views with others.
Develop the discipline, when sharing your opinion in any context, of starting with the facts from which you claim to derive your conclusions.
The problem is, our brains are designed for efficiency. So we tend not to store all the source data that shapes our stories and feelings. We tend to remember what we think or feel about things. But we don’t remember all the facts and observations that generated those stories or feelings. Thus, we are terrible at revising our views but great at arguing for their rightness. Knowing this, we can be more patient both with ourselves and others.
It is not true that words are necessary primarily for the sake of communication. Words are essential to the process of conceptualization and thus to all thought. They are as necessary in the privacy of a man's mind as in any public forum; they are as necessary on a desert island as in society. The word constitutes the completion of the integration stage; it is the form in which the concept exists.
I suspect that language wars used to start for reasons described by storyteller Garrison Keillor in his 1985 book "Lake Wobegon Days," in which he told of the frustration of immigrants to the U.S. who found themselves surrounded by people who don't speak the same native language. "You become a yokel ... an idiot," Keillor wrote, no matter how smart and insightful you might have been when you could speak in the language you know best.
For the social ecologist language is not "communication." It is not just "message." It is substance. It is the cement that holds humanity together. It creates community and communication.
But doctors, bosses and politicians should think carefully before throwing away widely understood words, or using them in new and radically different ways. In the rush to seem up to date, they risk doing a disservice to their own patients, employees and voters.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
There’s a saying about the public arena: “control the vocabulary and you control the debate.” Words frame the issue; they are the vehicle for meaning and emotion. Some words are incendiary. Some words are empathetic.
Missing Reference