By Definition

I have some shocking news. You may not know it, but we are surrounded by establishments which sell dismembered parts of dead plants and animals to the public. They are called restaurants and grocery stores.

Yet, we don't go out at 12 noon and say, "Let's go put some dead things in our mouths." We say, "let's go have lunch." I may tell you that the soup you eat is dead, but to you it may seem very much "alive with flavor".


My morbid little exercise in linguistics is not an attempt to make you vegetarian. But I wish to illustrate how we commonly use language to shield us from the truth, to make the truth, shall we say, palatable. It is "the slaughterhouse effect". The machinations of what's really going on "behind the scenes" are hidden from view -- deliberately blocked by our own minds -- for our "convenience".


So what's the big deal? Well, if language can conceal how animals are killed so we may eat them, what else can language conceal? A great deal, I'm afraid.

What is the truth? It depends on the words we use. It depends on the grammar we use. Language is the invisible code with which we decipher our world. Language is the software on which our minds run, and the very structure of that language software controls how we think – and what we are allowed to think about!

But the underlying structure of one's language, and the ground rules it sets up, are so much a part of us that we don't recognize the biases and colorations of the language we live in, in much the same way a fish doesn't know it's in the water. As Neil Postman once observed, we live all our lives deep within the boundaries and assumptions of our language, and it often takes special training to see outside of those boundaries.

The thought process inside your brain is nearly inseparable from the language that gives form to it. How you think about time, dividing your life into minutes, days, and years... how you think about the money in your pocket, your family, the many aspects of your career... The only way you can cope and reason with all these ideas inside your head is with the machine of many parts called language.

Yet you didn't invent the language you think with. It comes from your culture, implanted by parents and peers.

All our lives we struggle to make sense of the world. We compulsively strive to sort things out, to comprehend, and to put this complicated world into a – giant file cabinet – of categories. And yet the categories are also kind of like prisons. Once you establish a file cabinet of categories in your mind, you only allow yourself to see the world in just that way.

Yet categorization and labeling of people and ideas -- assigning each item a meaning, a label -- is essential for analysis and comparison. You can't assess anything unless you can differentiate it from everything else.

The choice of certain pivotal words in any discussion can go a long way towards deciding the matter before an argument or disagreement even begins.

Detainee has now become the word of choice when describing persons who have been imprisoned or incarcerated. Detention and detainees is a PR euphemism that comes from the correctional industry and from the military, and obviously, it takes the edge off the meaning of imprisonment. The word "detainee" has such a patrician air about it, as if they're serving milk and cookies after school.

In it's traditional meaning, if you were held up from meeting someone for an appointment, you'd say "Sorry, I was detained". Detention was an after-school punishment that held you up for a couple hours, not locked in a penitentiary for years. Are we now going to start calling Auschwitz prisoners "detainees"? I guess so.

The word detainee has been taken up in whole cloth by the entire political spectrum of media -- even KPFK on the so-called "left" uses the word to describe incarceration.

It is the responsibility of thinking, conscientious journalists to examine the not-so-subtle shades of meaning in the core words in a discussion. If the media accept and freely trade in the words handed to them by the authorities, they are confining themselves – and the entire debate –  in a prison of language.

Many words in our political system come from authority figures and government agencies whose language is skillfully designed to manipulate and shape public opinion. Skillful language usage is the essence of leadership. It is also the essence of leadership's evil twin, totalitarianism.

As long as we are trapped inside a file cabinet of words, numbers, and statistics supplied to us by authority figures, we will have difficulty reasoning clearly and objectively. Even if the facts are at hand, our cognitive process can be blocked by the "equations" made by certain repeating word combinations, which add up to a kind of propaganda.

Given that our language and thought process is imbedded in us by our culture, is it even possible to truly think independently? Yet language, if used skillfully, provides us the tools to fight back. Language links us to the world. To think for one's self, to question authority begins with questioning which words -- even which numbers -- are used to label things and events.

So language is the alphabet soup that makes our minds work. And simmering inside that delicious alphabet soup is a "cold war" of words, invisible but in turmoil, words perpetually renewing themselves for defense and offense, much as a body's immune system fights a constant battle to defend against attacking microbes.

Welcome to my soup.