Such Language!

It's really funny how often times what you say is not what I hear (or, of course, vice versa). It seems rather common to pick up an entirely different dialog from the actual words being said.

You know how it works. A kind husband takes his wife out for dinner. He is looking over the menu, aware of the current economy, and says, "Man, prices just keep going up, don't they?" What she hears is, "Man, you sure are expensive. You never seem to stop costing me money." Now, he (likely) never intended such a thing (because, remember, I started with "a kind husband"), but what she hears may not be what he intends.

It's not always that way. Sometimes what you hear may be exactly what was intended. On the news the other day Lakers fans were protesting the Lakers and Phil Jackson (the coach). Jackson had said, "If I heard right, the American people are for strong immigration laws, if I’m not mistaken." The protester I heard interviewed said, "We want Phil Jackson to say that he is against Arizona's immigration law." Simple, straightforward, and not what I heard at all. What I heard was, "We do not want public figures to express opinions opposed to ours. We want Phil Jackson to have the opinion that we allow and not something different. By no means should he be allowed to express a different point of view."

Or how about the message I saw on the side of a building the other day? It was a spray-painted (and ghastly) cartoon of a person yelling for help. "Help us! Our civil rights are being raped!" It was a protest to the Arizona immigration enforcement law. How ironic that the protester had no qualms about defiling the business owner's civil rights by painting this message on the side of the building. "My perception of my civil rights are important," this protester told me. "Yours are not! All that is important is that I get what I want!"

Often language is used intentionally to present a different conversation than the surface one. "McCollum urges support for anti-abortion bill at St. Lucie event," the headline reads. It seems that Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, running for governor in Florida, urged Republicans to lobby the present governor "on behalf of legislation this week that requires women seeking abortions to pay for an ultrasound and hear a doctor describe the fetus." So, while the message was that Bill was hoping that legislation would pass that required doctors to more clearly explain the fetus to the mother, it was "anti-abortion". There's a loaded term. Of course, there is another, more loaded term. Amanda Marcotte writes for RH Reality Check (where "RH" stands for "reproductive health"), "Anti-choicers were very close to killing health care reform entirely over abortion." What is intended in these terms? It's very clear. Let's kill the argument before the arguments begin. "Oh," we'll say, "you're anti-abortion or, worse, anti-choice!" Of course, it simply isn't true. It's that old "poisoning the well" fallacy. "If you are not in favor of women being allowed to kill their babies in the womb, you are 'anti-' something -- either abortion or choice." Not really. We're pro-life. We believe that these babies have the same right to live that the "pro-choicers" claim for their mothers. In fact, if medical science could come up with a method of terminating a pregnancy without terminating the life of the child, we'd have nothing more to say about it. It's not that there is something special about pregnancy that we want to defend. It's something about life. It's about not aborting life. It's about not allowing that child choices. But the language terminates that discussion ... intentionally. So the news item about Bill McCollum was intended to paint Bill McCollum in a negative light.

We do it all the time. We filter what we hear based on what we expect. If we anticipate something nice, we might read into an apparently unkind statement something nice. If we want to make a point, we might purposely use language to make people hear more than our arguments. "Not only are they mistaken ... they're evil." It's the job of advertisers everywhere; use language that will make them want the product preferably without even knowing why. So Impalas and Mustangs are still marketed as sporty and quick because, hey, "impala" and "mustang" conjures up images of cool and quick! The company named Suave wants to convey that their entire line is "smoothly agreeable and courteous" just by the name. And so it goes.

Look, I'm not saying don't do it. Hey, I'd be quite surprised if I don't do it myself. It's often not even conscious. I read a piece the other day titled, "Joe Legal vs Jose Illegal" which, I noted, automatically assumed that the illegal was Hispanic ... without even trying. I'm quite sure that the graffiti criminal I mentioned above wasn't thinking at all about the civil rights he was violating when he attacked the wall. We all do it. I'm just trying to make you aware. People do it. Be aware of it. You do it. Be aware of it. And sometimes -- too often in my opinion -- there is a failure of communication where there just shouldn't have been. Be aware of it. Just keep your eyes open to your own communication and to others. Communication, you see, is tenuous at best.