Identifying politically motivated language

Labelling and masking

Some years ago, reporters used the term female circumcision to describe a horrific medical procedure which teenage girls in West Africa were forced to undergo. When the media began reporting on the victims of this procedure, pressure groups insisted that they use the term genital mutilation instead. Why?

And why did 1970s President Jimmy Carter refer to the failed mission to rescue American hostages in Iran, as an incomplete success? 

We always have a choice over which words we use to describe a person, practice or thing; often the choice as to which words we do use comes down to how we feel about it. Linguists call this extra meaning in words “connotation” and talk about words carrying a “positive” or “negative” connotation. Writer and speech makers can exploit this property of words to mask their own weaknesses as well as label their opponents as weak themselves.

If you were leader of the “men are wonderful” party, what column would you choose to describe businesswomen? Can you think of any more word pairs you would use? Let’s get some pairs for the “women are wonderful” party describing football fans – positive and negative.

Independent	Distant
Determined	Stubborn
Assertive	Pushy
Sociable	Mouthy
Quick-tempered	Moody

Metaphorical transformation

Edward Bernays (1891 – 1995) is known as the father of modern marketing. The nephew of psychologist Sigmund Freud, Bernays revolutionised marketing by selling people what they wanted, not just what they needed. Before Bernays, most adverts focused on the practical advantages of owning the product, i.e. our motorcycle is reliable, cheap and easy to drive. Nowadays motorcycle adverts are full of middle-aged men escaping from the routine of family life, driving off into a desert sunset to the slogan: we sell freedom. The question is: “Does a middle-aged man want or need a motorcycle?” What do you think? Also, why is a motorcycle a metaphor for freedom?

Bernays’ greatest success was a campaign to break the taboo against women smoking in public. In the early twentieth century, smoking was seen as an inappropriate habit for women. However, in 1929 Bernays shattered this image when he re-marketed cigarettes as “torches of freedom”. To launch the campaign, he hired suffragettes  to march down 5th Avenue, New York on Easter Sunday, smoking and calling: “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!” The result was dramatic. In 1923 women only purchased 5% of cigarettes sold, in 1929 it increased to 12%, in 1935 the percentage of cigarettes purchased by women was 18.1%.

Metaphor is a powerful tool for advertisers and newspaper writers because it highlights one set of characteristics while hiding another. For example, we do not think of cigarettes as being addictive or carcinogenic when we call them ‘torches of freedom’. Can you think of any more examples in which products are sold through metaphor? Which set of characteristics are being highlighted and which hidden?

Abstracting (or euphemism)

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote: "Evil is the product of man's ability to make abstract that which is concrete”. Sartre was writing at a time when the world had just learned the horrors of the Nazi’s campaign to murder European Jews. And what did the Nazis call this campaign? Not murder but The Final Solution, a term so abstract and far removed from the reality of gassing naked men, women and children to death that we can speak it without making the connection. 

Some words are more abstract than others. Animal is a higher-level abstraction than dog, which is a higher-level abstraction than labrador, which is a higher-level abstraction than my pet Rex. If we were to make an abstraction ladder, animal would be at the top and my pet Rex and perhaps even a photo would be at the bottom. The higher the level of abstraction, the farther we are from the real-life experience.

Bravery is an abstract concept. Can you make a ladder connecting it to a concrete real world action? Can you make the following more acceptable by creating an abstract ladder in the opposite direction?

a broken leg a lost mobile phone a failed history exam

Misleading 

This technique is commonly seen on packaging and labelling of food products in the supermarket. Here are some examples.

Company/Product	What they claim:	What they don’t mention:
Tetra Pak, a company which manufactures milk cartons	milk cartons are “easily recyclable”	few recycling programmes accept milk cartons
Breakfast Cereal	product “provides 25% of the daily-recommended amount of protein if taken with a glass of milk”	all or almost all of the protein is provided by the milk, not by the breakfast cereal
Lemonade	“authentic taste of lemons”	has no lemon juice, pulp or peel in it whatsoever
Healthy Choice yoghurt	“low in fat”	high in sugar and therefore fattening

Examples like these prompted American Secretary of Health Dr. Louis W. Sullivan to claim that consumers need to be “linguists, scientists and mind readers to understand the many labels they see”. Indeed, deceptive food labelling is so extensive that many governments have made it law that companies print nutrition tables on most food packaging giving a detailed breakdown of how much fat, sugar, calories, etc. the product contains. 

Can you think of any more examples of misleading packaging from your home culture?

Covert evaluations

Covert means ‘hidden’, and this strategy is a way that writers can give you a hidden evaluation of a situation while pretending to give you the facts. For example, when a writer says that “an accurate assessment of the situation was made by the Pentagon” or that “businesses gave the president  trustworthy advice on the state of the economy” he or she is making judgments for you, telling you that an assessment is accurate or suggesting that businesses know what is best for the economy. There are always those in the media who are ready to give us the right view, the correct opinion, trustworthy advice or reliable information. Beware of such language. It indicates people are less interested in reporting what happened than in having you think as they do.

Many so-called “attitude adverbs” can also be used to make covert value judgements. What extra meaning do the attitude adverbs in bold add to each sentence? What questions would you like to ask the author to find out more about his or her opinions in each case?

1. As Sullivan rightly noted, it would have been a mistake to limit the freedom of the press following 9/11.

2. The American government has regrettably decided to limit trade with Russia.

3. The United Kingdom Independence Party has said that they will hopefully pull the UK out of Europe if they are elected.

4. Despite the recent rumours of heated arguments between the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, the Labour party are apparently united in their aim to continue the war in Iraq. 

Vague language

Monica Lewinsky

In 1998, American president Bill Clinton was accused of having an affair with White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. When confronted with the accusation Lewinsky denied it swearing: “I have never had a sexual relationship with the president”. Clinton then swore that what she said was “absolutely true”. Later, she admitted to having oral sex with the president, and Clinton responded by saying that he “did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate”. It looked for a while that Clinton might have to resign, but in his defence he argued that there is a difference between having a sexual relationship and engaging in sexual acts. Later, in his address to the people on August 17, 1998, he claimed that his previous “answers were legally accurate,” and he admitted only that he had “misled people.” 

Donald Rumsfeld

As a former lawyer, Clinton knew that his initial use of the term sexual relationship was vague enough to ensure that if the real truth ever came out, he would be able to make this important distinction. Another famous example of how vague language has been exploited by politicians comes from US Secretary of State during the Iraq invasion, Donald Rumsfeld. When asked the question: “Why have American troops failed to find any evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?” Rumsfeld famously answered:

Reports that say something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know. 

What do you think this means? If you had been at this press conference, how would you have reacted?