10.3 Words As Weapons

Have you ever received a “Shibboleth” warning on your computer? If you wondered where that unusual word came from, it’s from the Bible: specifically, a story in Judges about the aftermath of a battle, and the difficulty of one tribe (the Gileadites) trying to identify enemies (Ephraimites) who are escaping. When people, some of whom might be neutral passersby, try to cross a bridge, the Gileadites have a simple test, “Say the word Shibboleth.” The Ephraimites do not have the “sh” sound in their language, so they pronounce it “Sibboleth” instead, and they are promptly killed. This trick has since been used by many others (1302, at the Battle of the Golden Spurs, in which people were killed if they couldn’t pronounce “schild en vriend” properly; and 1937, in the Dominican Republic, where at least 20,000 Haitians were murdered for not being able to say “perejil,” the Spanish word for parsley), right up until the present day, when the word “palianytsia,” a Ukrainian word for bread, is used by Ukrainians to spot Russians.

Even if no one is killed, words have long been used to sort insiders from outsiders, usually to the detriment of outsiders. Has anyone made fun of you for using the wrong term (“pop” or “soda” or “coke”) for carbonated soft drinks? Do certain regional accents sound less intelligent to you than others? People who can’t speak “properly” have always been disparaged, denied jobs and housing, and mocked. The definition of “proper” is usually affiliated with the ruling class, the highly educated, or both, and if you can’t speak the way they do, you’re excluded from the benefits they enjoy. If you were raised hearing “Ain’t isn’t a word,” or corrected for pronouncing “ask” as “aks,” you have encountered this. These different approaches to language reflect the difference between two language-focused academic disciplines: English and linguistics. English tends to look to authorities to find the “correct” usage of language; if a word doesn’t appear in a dictionary, you shouldn’t use it. Linguistics is more value-neutral, and may say “Of course ‘ain’t’ is a word! It is used by millions of people every day!”

As an example, before the 1970s, it was widely believed that African American communities spoke an impoverished version of language, and that phrases like “It be raining” reflected ignorance or the inability to learn “proper” English. Linguist William Labov was the first scholar to start to examine African American speech patterns in a more open-minded way, and recognized African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a legitimate dialect with its own grammatical rules. In books such as Language in the Inner City: Studies in Black English Vernacular (1972), Labov proved that AAVE (also known as Ebonics) was as legitimate as any other dialect. Whether that proof has helped an Ebonics speaker get a job rather than the speaker of a more “respected” dialectic is another question. Scholars saying that we should treat all dialects equally is not enough to get the general public to respond the same way.

Some forms of bias and discrimination were hard-baked into the language, and have reinforced stereotypes and values that are only recently being eradicated. For instance, if you think someone is acting “hysterically” (meaning “emotionally unhinged,” not “hilariously funny”), you are tapping into an old belief that people with a womb (“hystera”) cannot control their emotions. Or think of the difference between the gendered words for similar things: to “mother” a baby carries connotations of nurturing and affection, but to “father” a baby just means to make someone pregnant. A “master” has come to mean someone who is very good at something (as in, someone with a “Master of the Arts” degree), but the equivalent “mistress” conjures images of a woman who consorts with a married man. Then there is the habit of attaching a gendered suffix to some words, which can make the version with the suffix sound less important. If a “waiter” is a person who waits on tables, why do we need a separate word for a woman who does that job (“waitress”)? Likewise, “actress” and “comedienne”? We have no equivalent for traditionally female jobs (“teacheress,” “secretaryess”), but sometimes feel compelled to add a gender marker (“male nurse”; “woman surgeon”). Society has made great strides in replacing those kinds of terms with gender-neutral ones (“server”; “mail carrier”; “firefighter”), but there is always further progress to be made. (For further reading, see this chapter.)

Jargon is another example of language-based exclusion. Is it an overgeneralization to say that every industry, every organization, and every workplace has some form of jargon or specialized terms? Perhaps, but many workplaces are heavily jargon-prone. If you ask the people there why they use jargon, the first answer is obvious: simplicity and time-saving. If you spend much of your workday talking about “return on investment” or analyzing “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats,” it’s only natural to call them ROI and SWOTs. Saying “HBCU” instead of the full “Historically Black Colleges and Universities” will save you eleven syllables! If you are in a specialized field, jargon also captures more precision: the common term “heart attack,” for instance, doesn’t distinguish between a non-ST elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI) and ventricular fibrillation (V-Fib).

Efficiency and precision are all well and good, but jargon has a third function: to separate insiders from outsiders. A recently graduated student forwarded me an internal memo she received on the job; it was littered with acronyms and jargon in every sentence. The student added, “I’ve been here 6 months and still have NO idea what 90% of these acronyms mean.” Jargon can make a new employee feel like they don’t belong, but what if the audience is not an employee? Some professions — trial law, medicine and dentistry, even car repair — require both extensive training and a lot of interaction with the public. People in those professions can easily forget that the members of the public they are talking to (jurors, patients, customers) can’t follow what they are saying. Lawyers and doctors go to school for a long time and work hard to learn a lot of (often Latin) terminology, so they naturally slip into using that language instead of a simpler plain English term — or worse, they think there is no plain English term they could use. During the jury selection process, for example, a juror sometimes brings up a sensitive topic that they would rather not discuss in open court. If the lawyer says, “Would you prefer to continue this conversation in camera?” the juror might get alarmed, not realizing that “in camera” means “in the judge’s chambers.” The remedies here are to either teach the lay person (the juror or patient) the right terminology, or translate those esoteric terms into plain language. The second option is better, but requires a vigilant attitude and continual effort not to slip back into the jargon the professionals are used to using.