blogcutter

These days, I don't have the patience or fortitude to do extensive genealogical research. On the other hand, I am endlessly fascinated by some of the terminology I see used in family histories. Things like:

Joe Blow was a child of natural birth

Jill Hill was born on the wrong side of the blanket

As modern-day readers, we probably understand what is meant and muse to ourselves: how quaint! We may reflect on how closed-minded earlier generations were. Then we congratulate ourselves on our wokeness at having mastered Equity Diversity & Inclusion 101.

It's true that the euphemisms we use to spare others - whether from hurt feelings, shame, embarrassment or more serious consequences like overt discrimination or ostracization - are very much governed by the era and cultural milieu in which we live. But what we may not always see is that we can get just as outraged and offended today about language usage with no malicious intent - it's just that today we are offended by different words and terms.

Take, for example, the word "queer", which some gays and lesbians embrace while others reject as an insult or slur. Or inadvertent misgendering or deadnaming. Even asking for a person's pronouns is a bit of a sticky wicket, in my opinion. I mean, if a person volunteers or chooses to provide them, that's fine. Personally, I'd prefer not to be asked in the first place. If someone addressed me as "Sir" or Mr. Blogcutter, I'd be a little surprised but I don't think I'd be either offended or flattered. Depending on the particular situation, I might or might not correct them.

But even when folks use the most up-to-date, woke-certified language, there is terminology I find misleading or depersonalizing at best, and mildly-to-moderately insulting at worst.

"Assigned Male at Birth" or"Assigned Female at Birth" implies, to me at least, that the doctor or midwife just flips a coin or uses a random X&Y generator to decide if the just-delivered babe is a boy or a girl, whereas in a majority of cases, there is actually no medical or otherwise specialized expertise needed to determine the baby's biological sex. Yes, mistakes can be made and ambiguities occasionally occur. And certainly there is no way (that I know of) of getting inside the infant's mind to determine their gender identity, any more than we can know if they will ultimately approve of the names that we as parents assign to them.

Then there's the whole range of words we use to describe a person's state of mental health or illness, some colloquial, some technical. The term "manic-depressive" has given way to the term "bi-polar" which I find far less descriptive or evocative - or at least, it's evocative of something other than what's intended. I picture some white conjoined bears living up in the Arctic. Or perhaps a new species of penguin or puffin which is native to both the Arctic and Antarctic?

Another pair of terms I hear a lot these days is "neurodiverse" vs. "neurotypical" (my Autocorrect feature recognizes these words so they must be right, right?) I guess to most of the medical experts, I'm probably "neurotypical". But is ANYBODY truly neurotypical? Is there such an animal? And isn't it human nature to want to be recognized for whatever our particular talents or personal qualities and assets may be?

I'm sure you can think of other examples. Wouldn't it be interesting to know what people of the 22nd or 23rd century will make of the language we use today?

Ah, words. You know, those things we use to communicate with.

Some words are highly ambiguous and have many emotional overtones, and that's one reason why human language is so rich and expressive. But when we need to communicate an important message (say, regarding COVID vaccines) to millions or billions of people, we usually try to pick plain and simple language that people will understand immediately, at first listen or read.

Problem is, the commonest words in our language are precisely the ones that we use in idiomatic expressions and that can denote and connote multiple concrete and abstract concepts. And some of the most commonly used words are colour words, like blue, black or green.

When it comes to crafting messages for broadcast or wide public consumption, we can't get away with saying, like Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."

So what about green? And what if I say "Green Lives Matter!"

My first impulse is generally to interpret "green" in the sense of ecologically-minded, as in Greenpeace or the Green Party. But of course, the word "green" has many other connotations as well.

Maybe it means that the lives of little green men - space aliens who feed on all that green cheese on the moon - are what matters.

Maybe I'm saying the lives of rich people matter. Sadly that does often seem to be the way of the world.

Do people only matter if they are jealous or envious? Or if they are newbies, still "wet behind the ears"?

Foodstuffs may be green if they're unripe but also if they're overripe and have gone mouldy.

"Code green" in hospital lingo is apparently used to call for an emergency evacuation.

I may be walking a thin green line by posting this but if I've offended anyone ... well, I'm a vegetarian and I'd be happy to eat my words.

... but words can shape my brain. According to neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, "Words are tools for regulating human bodies by regulating one another's body budgets."

Well, maybe - up to a point. She goes on to write: If you constantly struggle in a simmering sea of stress and your body budget accrues an ever-deepening deficit, that's called chronic stress.

Here's the article I read, which is apparently an excerpt from her book 7 1/2 Lessons About The Brain:

https://ideas.ted.com/peoples-words-and-actions-can-actually-shape-your-brain-a-neuroscientist-explains-how/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

As we slog through a pandemic, I've no doubt that plenty of us are struggling in that simmering sea of stress - and wouldn't it be wonderful if words alone could get us through to the end of it?

There's no question that words and language can be powerful. A kind word at the right time can make a huge difference. But at the same time, I can think of many circumstances in which there's a real need for telling it like it is or at least how the experts view it from a reasonably well-informed perspective.

So how do we address the elephant in the room if we're not even allowed to say the e-word?

I think we're all familiar with the way usage shifts over time in the interests of political correctness. Words which at one time were not considered pejorative, like "idiot", "imbecile", "moron" and "retarded", or any number of words denoting other disabilities, or race, gender or ethnicity, are now taboo. But what I find much more insidious is the number of words and turns of phrase that we casually drop into everyday speech and even written communication, without ever questioning - nor causing others to question - what they imply.

For instance: we regularly trivialize, even normalize domestic violence when we refer to it as a "crime of passion". Another misused word is "schizophrenic", as in "I think you have to be a bit schizophrenic to do this work" (meaning that you have to be able to keep your mind on two or three things simultaneously) or "I have kind of a schizophrenic attitude towards doctor-assisted suicide" (meaning that your views on the issue seem to contradict each other, or you feel conflicted about it). Of course, schizophrenia is a very serious illness and not the same thing as having multiple personalities. Nor is it usually a laughing matter, although I'm not necessarily opposed to black humour. Sometimes, in fact, it may be put to good use, as in the "Cracking up the capital" campaign. But that's actually raising awareness about a serious social and psychological problem, as opposed to glossing over or minimizing the problem and suggesting, albeit unintentionally, that it's not really much of a problem in the first place.

Then there's the whole computer-related lingo. The Internet as the "information highway"? Surely you don't build a highway until enough people have cars or other relatively high-speed vehicles to drive on it. Are WE the cars? Are our computers the cars? Are we self-driving cars or would those be the search engines, net crawlers, "bots" and so on? The term "word processing" was coined in the early days of desktop computing. But is it really the words themselves that we or our computer is processing? Seems to me it's at a rather more macro level than that. I guess we are indeed at some level processing text, though of course "texting" means something else again. Is this kind of misnomer damaging in the same way as the examples I mentioned in the paragraph above? In some ways, I would say yes. The moment we talk about automated or computerized ANYTHING - two examples I can think of being translation and cataloguing - we are minimizing the intellectual, emotional and physical contributions (I almost wrote "input") of the human at the expense of the primarily mindless, though undeniably often useful, activity of the machine.

When it comes to proper names, of course, there's often not much that can be done. I've been bothered by some time for the word or acronym "Isis" used to refer to a radical Islam group as opposed to the magical ancient Egyptian mother-goddess. But the first time I heard of a human by that name (I did once know a cat named Isis) was this morning on the radio when I learned that some unfortunate young lady named Isis had been expelled from Facebook.

There's also the question of identical-looking (and sometimes identical-sounding) words that have vastly different meanings depending on what language you're using. The "faux amis" in French. Or words like "Mist" which in English has somewhat poetic or gothic connotations but in German means "manure". During my university years, as part of a German exam, we were required to translate a short passage from English to German without using a dictionary. One of the words in it was "cancer" which I had learned but somehow forgotten in the stress of the exam. So I wrote "Kanzer" and then looked up the proper translation after the exam was over. For years thereafter, I couldn't watch Dallas on TV without thinking of Ray Krebs as "Mr. Cancer" - but I don't suppose I'll ever forget the German word for cancer!