10.5 Adapting To Your Audience

One of the themes of this chapter is that it’s important to be sensitized to the power of words, good and bad — the power to persuade and heal, as well as the power to attack and harm. It is useful to think of the effects that words have on audiences, and how those words make people feel. At the same time, there is such a thing as being over-sensitized, and falling for the trap of thinking that changing language is enough to solve fundamental societal problems.

It’s also good to adapt your language to your audience, which sometimes requires being “multi-dialectical.” You might not be multilingual — able to speak and switch between languages — but you’re probably able to switch from slang to formal language when it’s called for, or when jargon is helpful rather than being exclusionary and alienating. Code-switching is the ability to alternate between dialects or speech styles, an ability that benefits everyone.

Knowing different dialects and styles has the advantage of giving you more choices about how to express yourself. For example, you know a good set of swear words to use in the company of some people, but also how to avoid saying anything offensive to a different set of people. I’ll call this the vividness scale.

The Vividness Scale: Swearing

Sometimes speakers want to provoke a strong reaction from their audience, and the most obvious way to do that is to swear. An indication of the power of swear words can be found in the MPAA movie rating system, which suggests that some words are so powerful that children should never hear them (some words are okay for a 13-year-old to hear; other words are not appropriate for children younger than 17). If R-rated movies are shown on certain television channels, those words are “bleeped out” or replaced with other words. There are two relevant questions to ponder:

What is a swear word? The definition obviously varies widely from one culture to another, but has also shifted dramatically over time. Another categorical term for swear words is “profanity,” but that only refers to a certain type: religious words that profane what is holy, such as “hell” or “damn” (which means “condemn to hell”). Note that these words won’t get a movie slapped with an R rating, suggesting that not everyone considers these to be swear words anymore. And even the words “swearing” and “cursing” hark back to these roots: to “swear” means “to make a solemn promise or take an oath,” and the meaning of “curse” is similar to “damn” — i.e., the opposite of “bless.”

Nowadays, when people talk about someone swearing, it usually has little to do with religion or promises, and more with sex or bodily functions. In The Stuff of Thought (2007), Steven Pinker found an interesting pattern when it comes to sex: intransitive words that require a preposition (such as “make love to” or “have sex with”) are okay, but transitive words that don’t require a preposition (in the form “John verbed Mary”) are considered vulgar. Why certain words for sexual and bodily topics are unacceptable in polite society could turn into a long philosophical debate, but it’s easy to recognize that it has to do with what people are squeamish about discussing in a particular society (more on this in the Euphemisms section below).

Recently, it seems that even those words related to sex and bodily functions are losing some of their potency — perhaps from overuse — and a new category of “swear words” is arising: words that demean categories of people. This includes gender-specific insults, derogatory names for races, and hurtful terms for disabilities. These are sometimes called “slurs,” and for some people a slur is worse than a swear word.

Do they help? People use swear words to increase the impact of their message, but the words don’t always have this effect. Sometimes they can make people stop listening to your message, or hurt your credibility. Academic studies of swearing tend to find that swearing usually hurts the effectiveness of your message more than it helps. However, much of that research is quite old (dating back to the 1970s and 1980s),^[1] and some more recent studies suggest that the tide may be turning.^[2]

When considering whether to swear or not, consider these factors:

• Context: Who is doing the swearing, who they are talking to, and where they are all make an enormous difference. It is not well-advised to swear during job interviews, testimony to Congress, press conferences, or conversations with the elderly (depending on who they are). But a well-timed curse word dropped into the right conversation can be a very effective attention-getter, and a good way to express strong emotions.
• Overuse: One more reason not to rely too heavily on swear words is because there are only so many of them, and using the same words over and over, regardless of which words they are, is generally not a good use of language. The 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street used “the F word” 569 times — a mind-numbing amount which shows a lack of imagination on the screenwriter’s part. Steven Pinker said it well: “If an overuse of taboo words, whether by design or laziness, blunts their emotional edge, it will have deprived us of a linguistic instrument that we sometimes sorely need” (The Stuff of Thought, p. 370).

The Vividness Scale: Adjectives

Short of using swear words, how else can language be made vivid? One simple technique is to use sensory language that will get the listener more in touch with bodily senses. Rather than describing something using generic adjectives, as in “the house was scary,” getting into the details of how something looked, sounded, and smelled will make it more vivid: “the floorboards creaked, the only light was from a shaft of moonlight coming through the attic window, and the smell had a sharpness like that of rotting onions”.

On the topic of adjectives, let’s look at a problem with their use: adjective inflation. Inflation doesn’t just refer to the devaluing of money. In academic circles, for instance, some colleges are concerned about “grade inflation.” The tendency for grades to compress at the top of the scale can reach a point where a B+ (which originally meant “far exceeds expectations, and is well above the average”) comes to be seen as a poor grade. The problem with grade inflation is that if a teacher gives As to most student papers, and then reads one that is significantly better than all of the previous ones, there is no higher grade left to give, and the excellent paper gets exactly the same grade as papers that are far less excellent.

Adjectives, too, can be overextended, and thus lose all meaning. If you use the same word to describe things that are on different qualitative levels, it’s the same as giving every student an A+ regardless of how they did in class. British comedian Eddie Izzard has a routine about the word “awesome,” which originally meant “inspiring awe,” and should be reserved for incredible things that take one’s breath away and are hard for mortal minds to comprehend. Now, Izzard notes, “awesome” is used to refer to mundane things like hot dogs, and has come to mean “pretty good.” Like a devalued dollar, the “buying power” of the word “awesome” has been diminished, and the word can’t regain its original power.

Likewise, the word “ultimate”: on a denotative level, it means last in a series; nothing can come after it. It has come to connote something that is exciting and powerful, but not the last possible thing (when BMW refers to their cars as “the ultimate driving machine,” that doesn’t mean they’re going to stop producing new models). Sometimes the problem comes from the friction between two divisions of a company: the marketing division that is always trying to convince the public that this is the greatest product possible, and the research and development division that is busy coming up with something better. When Sufix, a fishing line company, names a product “Ultra Supreme,” or a credit card company calls their new card Platinum (better than the silver, gold, or diamond cards), what are they going to call the next upgrade?

The Vividness Scale: Euphemisms

On the opposite end of the vividness scale are euphemisms. These are terms specifically designed not to create emotional reactions, and instead to reduce offense or “soften the blow” of things that may shock. In the discussion of swearing, we mentioned the tendency for words describing certain bodily functions to turn into swear words. Consider where you can go to perform those functions: what is the name of the room in which you can urinate and defecate? Here are some possibilities:

• Bathroom
• Restroom
• Washroom
• Men’s/women’s room
• “The facilities”
• WC (a primarily British term)

Now, consider how ill-fitting these names are. “Bathroom” suggests that there’s a bath tub in there, which is not true for bathrooms outside the home (imagine calling it the “Shower Room,” though there’s no shower in it). “Restroom” sounds like a place where you can lie down (the only “resting” that takes place in there is emptying body cavities, so why isn’t it called an “Emptyroom”?). While it’s advisable to wash your hands at the end of your visit to the “Washroom,” it’s probably not the reason you went in there. “The men’s room” or “women’s room” (or variants like “Ladies”) doesn’t say anything about what the room is for, only who is allowed to go in it. “Facilities” is hopelessly vague, and “WC” can be called a double euphemism for people who find the phrase “Water Closet” too shocking. Why don’t any of these names reflect what people actually do in there? Answer: because no one wants to visualize that.

This connects to what author George Orwell said about euphemisms: that their purpose is to “name things without calling up mental images of them” (Politics and the English Language, 1946). Orwell was talking about all the euphemisms he heard in the context of World War II:

Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.

This brings our attention to other domains in which euphemisms are frequently found.

• Bodily functions: “number two,” “wetness protection,” “that time of the month,” “passing gas”
• Sex: “sleeping with” someone; “male enhancement,” “bikini area.” Euphemisms around sex are so common that when someone uses the vaguest phrase possible, “doing it,” we assume that they’re talking about sex.
• Death: “passed away,” “remains” (not “dead body”), and if it’s a dog, “put to sleep”
• War: “ethnic cleansing,” “friendly fire” (being killed a fellow soldier), “enhanced interrogation techniques” (instead of “torture”)
• Employment: “downsizing” (not “firing”), “adverse event” (not “disaster”), “underperforming assets” (bad debts)
• Failure: “held back” (instead of “failed second grade”), “rapid unscheduled disassembly” (a term used by Space X to refer to rockets that explode)
• Embarrassment: “plus-sized,” “wardrobe malfunction,” “height challenged”

In the film In Good Company, a boss says that he will have to “let some people go.” An employee responds, “Why do you say ‘let them go’? They don’t want to go. Why don’t you just say ‘fire’ them?” To which the boss replies, “Because it sounds better.” But then the employee reveals the weakness of euphemisms: “Not to the person being fired, it doesn’t.” Euphemisms may succeed in reducing emotional reactions, but only to a limited degree.

Add to this the possible confusion if the listener doesn’t know what “I’m going to see a man about a horse” (urinate) or “in the family way” (pregnant) means — especially non-native speakers. Euphemisms are an example of an idiom: defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “A speech form or an expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements.” It’s perfectly understandable that a child who knows what the word “sleep” means misinterprets what “put to sleep” means in reference to a dog, and asks when the dog is going to wake up. Someone learning English can quickly learn that to “put down” usually means to place an object on a surface, but it takes longer to grasp that when you’re talking about a pet, “put down” means euthanize (no one ever says “Fluffy was getting old, so we took her to the vet to be killed”), and when you’re talking about a baby, “put down” means “gently place the baby in a crib for a nap.”

Even when you learn the complete vocabulary of a language, you’re only halfway there: you also have to learn all those phrases that don’t follow grammatical or semantic rules, phrases you just have to memorize — and since they are so “peculiar,” the risk of getting them slightly wrong is an ever-present danger. Instead of saying “shoot the breeze” (talk about unimportant things), you say “shoot the wind” and people look at you like you are “two bricks short of a load” (not very intelligent).