Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Words in Politics

Morning Edition had an article this morning about how political experts differ when it comes to defining the word "terrorism." Is an act of terrorism simply any kind of politically motivated violence? A campaign to severely intimidate and harass that may or may not be violent? A violent or intimidating attack that is clearly directed by a political group? A violent act perpetrated against a noncombatant? Each expert had a different take.

In the political context, words can be weapons and language a battlefield. Stephen Poole picks apart some of the layers of meaning in political speech in his book Unspeak. Political terms and names such as "war on terror," "Friends of the Earth," "free trade," and "gay community," he argues, are carefully chosen for the extra weight they carry by implication. That is, these terms are so evocative that they create a specific story that effectively silences any opposing viewpoint. If you don't support Friends of the Earth and its activities, then you must be an enemy of the earth; "free trade" has a positive, hopefully sounding cast, so if you're against it, you must be against freedom. Poole discusses eight politically charged words and their fellows – including, you'll be glad to hear, "terrorism."

Clearly political change itself is a driving force in the development of language – and this is true in our history as well as our present. The United States was founded at a time when politics, public debate, and access to the pulpit of the press were the nearly exclusive domain of a very few privileged people – land-owning, educated, protestant white men. In Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America, historian Kenneth Cmiel considers how the idealism of our young nation's grand experiment with democracy challenged this orthodox arrangement and caused a whole series of questions to arise: Is American English its own entity, meriting its own dictionaries and grammars? If so, should these include slang words and colloquial terms, or should they reflect a more refined manner of speech? Should newspapers, textbooks, and other books published here reflect colloquialisms or should they instruct Americans by their erudite example? What, indeed, is correct American English?

But how, you might ask, do words come to mean what they mean? Have you ever created one yourself? How did you do it? Sol Steinmetz and Barbara Ann Kipfer help explain how all this works in their book The Life of Language: The Fascinating Ways Words are Born, Live and Die. They look at their subject with a broad view, from word roots, to methods for shifting the meanings of words, to words we borrow from other languages, to how words can eventually pass out of use altogether.  This potentially dry subject really comes to life under Steinmetz's and Kipfer's care, and anyone with an interest in words or in language generally should find their book an engaging read.