Language Games

Language is pretty much fundamental to journalism yet it is, and always has been, highly contentious. In 1932, Aldous Huxley wrote of a future in which people are so bombarded with useless information that anything resembling the truth is drowned. 

In his novel, 1984 (published in 1949), George Orwell sketched a dystopian future in which language is designed to control the masses and preclude dissent. 

Images courtesy of Stuart McMillen

 Philosophers too have agonised over language. Ludwig Wittgenstein argued most (if not all) philosophical problems arise from the short-comings of our language and our failure to understand its logic. In, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he suggests that if we could amend our logic and our understanding and use of language, philosophical problems would dissolve. They wouldn’t be solved, they would dissolve – we would realise they were never truly problems to begin with. So we don’t so much gain wisdom as escape confusion.

Of course no-one has yet successfully dissolved the problems with language so the journalist’s primary tool remains an imperfect one. For better or worse it can be used to influence and control the audience’s way of thinking without them even realising it. In his book of the same title, Steven Poole refers to this phenomenon as “Unspeak”. When you encounter phrases like “intelligent design”, “ethnic cleansing”, “the war on terror”, “pro-choice”, or “pro-life” someone has put a lot of effort into getting that exact word combination to you. Far from being neutral, these words come pre-loaded with an unspoken but heavily biased argument. 

You’re in a pretty tough position if you wish to voice opposition to a war everyone accepts as “the war on terror”. Strictly speaking, to oppose such a war is to take sides with terror. The usual way of fighting this is to employ some unspeak of your own. In the early 1970s, “pro-abortionists” ditched their literal but unappealing moniker in favour of “pro-choice”. By 1976 anti-abortionists – who had been calling themselves the “right to life” movement – had constructed the reactionary epithet, “pro-life”. These two terms have been framing the debate ever since, thrusting people into an ethical dilemma before they’ve even had a chance to be informed on the issue – which do you value greater, life or choice? Life is fundamental but choice denotes freedom and what kind of life can we have without freedom? 

As a journalist, it is very easy to be drawn into using these words and unwittingly passing on the manipulation to a wider audience. How many articles do you see reporting on “ethnic cleansing”, “the war on terror”, “operation Iraqi freedom” and other ethically crowded phrases? Then there’s always the potential for you to take some subversive initiative and start manipulating language yourself. Or you could always try to fight back and refuse to use language in this way. Whatever your choice, it requires a level of hyper-attentiveness to recognise these phrases rather than just consuming them. It seems quite fitting to end with the words of Wittgenstein:

"Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself."