Note 78: Words, worth worry and wonder
Words, walking, writing, wrong
Words are funny things.
Every few months, we get medical students through at work for their psychiatry posting. And every so often one of them is describing a patient being discharged from hospital, and they use the R word: “Release.”
They say a patient was “released” from hospital rather than “discharged”.
I don’t let that pass when it happens. Not to have a go at them, but because it always provides a great opportunity to remind them of the power of language. So I remind them that the words we use both reflect our thinking and reinforce it. And that it’s not by accident that the word “release” comes to mind for them when describing what in any other medical context they’d describe as “discharge”. It’s the language of police arrests and prison sentences. And the fact that they use it not only reflects how mental healthcare gets perceived, but also reinforces it for them.
There are so many others: immigrant/expatriate, protest/riot, terrorist/lone shooter, crash/accident. Each of those word pairs are synonyms, but which of each pair you pick in any given case says something about the societal view of the issue you buy into. And so perhaps says more about you than the thing you’re using it to describe.
Noticing the things we say can be one of the best ways to learn about our own minds.
While we’re talking about words, if you enjoy these, why not share Notes on Being Human with a friend?
More on crash versus accident
We talk about planes crashing, never that there’s a “plane accident”. But somehow, “car accident” has become a commonly acceptable term. Ever wondered why?
This article argues that didn’t just happen, but came about by deliberate effort from car companies.
Media coverage in the early 1900s apparently depicted cars as dangerous killing machines, creating public backlash against cars—and by extension against the rich people who owned them. By the 1920s, carmakers were responding by pushing for laws to define streets as belonging to cars rather than people walking. Then they made crossing the street a crime. Then they worked to shape news coverage by offering a free service for newspapers that let reporters send in info about crashes, and have a full ready-to-print article within a day.
Those articles did two things: blamed the pedestrians instead of the driver, and used the word “accident.”
And here we are.
Consider this 2006 article from the NYT.
The paper described the incident as deliberate, yet twice—twice!—calls it an “accident.”
I’m not making fun of the NYT here. It’s a paper that, however you might feel about it, is highly respected for its attention to detail and style in writing. The point is that even the NYT fell for the bait-and-switch that began in the early 1900s.
That’s how deeply a word can sink its claws into your brain.
But that works both ways.
Books are magic
Words are wonderful things. They can be almost landmines, sure, but they can also be lifelines. Probably everyone has at least one memory of someone saying something to you that changed the course of your life in ways you’re still grateful for.
And in a brilliant paragraph, Carl Sagan captures how books can be magic, not just by being a vehicle for words, but by being a storage for them as well. Books allow words to transcend space and time and reach anyone anywhere at any time.
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
— Carl Sagan
Would you believe, though, that when I shared that quote in one WhatsApp group, someone thought it was wrong? They argued that audio and videos had come to be more important than words. I pointed out that many video creators start with writing a script first, and then get responses to that via comments. Even TikTok creators still often add captions to their videos. But I forgot to mention something even more important: a lot of audiovisual media gets forgotten within a week. Good ones might last months, but even the best films are forgotten by many within decades. But books? Books have been around for centuries, the best ones lasting even millennia.
Wouldn’t bet against a book if I were you.
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Creation begins with words and a book was later used to encompass it, therefore we should be mindful of how we use words because they(words) can build and as well destroy. Additionally, books are life long assets!!!