How we describe something can transform how we view it. Lauren Bravo wraps her tongue around the small linguistic tweaks that can have a big impact
These are busy times for words. Language is evolving faster than ever, and social media has made publishers of us all.
But among the buzzwords and political doublespeak, language still wields real power. The smallest linguistic alterations can create powerful, positive changes in the way we view things, even ourselves.This year, researchers from the University of Carolina, along with colleagues at Colgate University and Penn State, found that asking participants to consider ‘people in a group’ rather than ‘a group of people’, made them much more likely to think about the subject’s thoughts and feelings. Make that ‘a group of refugees’, or less empathetically, ‘migrants’, and we begin to recognise the dehumanising effect of a thousand tabloid headlines.
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It’s a neat trick; the language flip. It forces us to dig up the systemic defaults buried deep in our culture, and give them a good airing. Do they still represent us? Did they ever, really? We’re seeing it in agriculture: “I think we need to take back our language. I want to call my organic carrots ‘carrots’ and let [other farmers] call theirs a chemical carrot,” argues organic farmer (sorry, ‘farmer’) Mary Jane Butters in an interview on organic.org. Language puts the burden of proof on certain groups, but it can likewise move it just as easily.
What about when it comes to gender equality? Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams declared in an interview with Entertainment Weekly: “We should stop calling feminists ‘feminists’ and just start calling people who aren’t feminist ‘sexist’ – and then everyone else is just a human. You are either a normal person or a sexist”.
For those of us who wearily had the ‘feminism means equality…
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