{
  "format": "arthurs-review-publication-proof/v1",
  "createdAt": "2026-07-13T15:46:52.953Z",
  "publicUrl": "https://blog.leesaitool.com/society/flaws-of-our-language",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-07T09:32:46.052Z",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-11T10:28:39.012Z",
  "article": {
    "titleZh": "注意你是怎么说话的（并非更礼貌）",
    "titleEn": "Pay Attention to How You Talk (And No, I Don't Mean Be More Polite)",
    "slug": "flaws-of-our-language",
    "category": "society",
    "excerptZh": "PTSD是什么？这个缩写好吗？",
    "excerptEn": "What is PTSD? And is that acronym even good?",
    "seoDescription": "",
    "bodyZh": "今天的话题可能较为抽象，是关于我们班主任 Ms. Joanna 的。当然，我并不是说她不好——以下文章所写的，也不是她的问题，只是她的方式反映了社会上很多人思考和逃避的方式。\n\n我们先从语言说起。比如说海滩上有 1000 万粒沙子，不可能给每粒沙子都命一个名。所以人们想出了一个方法，把这所有的具体事物——英语中叫 particularity——给一个名字，叫它\"沙子\"，这在英语中称为 **generality**。听起来是个很妙的东西，对吧？\n\n不过这里有一个小小的问题：取一个 generality，前提是这个名字所包含的事物之间有很大的相似性，可以被归到同一个名字底下。否则风险就是，用这个名字所代表的某一样事物，来涵盖了这个名字所代表的所有事物。举个例子，比如说\"民主\"。一提民主，我们就想到美国的代议制，但实际上民主显然不止这个，有直接民主、间接民主、民主集中制等等。名字有时候会蒙骗人，比如某个国家的领导人说\"我们做了民主选举\"，很可能像朝鲜民主主义共和国一样，选几个虚无缥缈的代表做一些虚无缥缈的事情。\n\n再举一个例子来加深理解。一战的时候，士兵在战场上日夜看到**人死**、看到炮弹，极度恐惧。从战场上下来以后，会产生各种心理反应。那时候我们叫它 shell shock，到了二战换了个名字，叫 battlefield mental disorder，此后还有别的很多名字。总体来说，正是由于这个 generality 越来越抽象，代表的东西越来越多，我们便不能清晰地明白这个名称底下到底发生了什么。\n\n当然，后来你也知道了，现在我们直接叫它 **PTSD**——Post Traumatic Syndrome Disorder。光听这个词，根本猜不出这个人经历了什么。可能是被蛇咬了一下，也可能是在战场上亲眼看着最亲密的战友被炮弹炸成废墟。通过这两个例子可以看出，语言一旦越来越抽象、越来越 general，就有可能脱离实际，让这个词语所代表的其中一件事情，同时也\"代表\"了与之差别很大的另一件事情。\n\n那么，这和 Ms. Joanna 有什么联系呢？她有一个很明显的做法，就是把一些严重的、荒唐的事情换一个说法。比如说同学们往地上乱扔薯条包装盒，或者教室里弥漫着辣条的气味，又或者某个同学往教室里带了一条蛇。Ms. Joanna 不知出于什么原因，就是不说这些具体的事情——前几件事统称为\"向地上抛掷不明物体\"，教室气味说成\"空气中弥漫着异味\"，最后那件则说成\"携带野生动物\"。\n\n这样的用词有什么危害？我现在觉得最显著的一点，就是让人不知道具体发生了什么，把事情的严重性降低。有人可能会说，说的是什么就是什么。但问题恰恰在于，在这种 overly general 的语言里，一个词或一句话所代表的东西很多，其背后各个 particularity 之间的差别也很大。其实这就是**客套话、corporate language** 的本质——拿一些听起来中性、听起来高深的词汇，来掩盖事情糟糕或其他负面属性的本质。如今这些\"高端话语\"似乎已经成为进入某些圈层的准入门槛，从而**隔绝了真实，也剥夺了普通民众的话语权**。\n\n我认为说话这件事太重要了，每个词都值得好好想一想。",
    "bodyEn": "Today's topic might be a bit abstract. It's about our homeroom teacher, Ms. Joanna. Now, I'm not saying she's a bad person—what I'm writing about here isn't her problem specifically. It's just that the way she does things reflects how a lot of people in society think, and how they avoid thinking.\n\nLet's start with language. Say there are 10 million grains of sand on a beach. You can't give every single grain its own name. So people came up with a method: take all those individual things—what in English you'd call *particularities*—and slap one name on the whole lot. \"Sand.\" In English they call this **generality**. Sounds pretty clever, right?\n\nBut here's the small problem: calling something a generality only works if the things bundled under that name are genuinely similar enough to be grouped together. Otherwise, you risk using one thing the name represents to stand in for *everything* the name represents. Take \"democracy\" for example. The moment someone says democracy, you think of America's representative system. But democracy is obviously more than that—there's direct democracy, indirect democracy, democratic centralism, and so on. Names can deceive you. When a country's leader says \"we held a democratic election,\" it might end up being something like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea—picking a handful of ghost representatives to do some ghostly business.\n\nHere's another example to drive the point home. During World War I, soldiers on the battlefield watched people die day and night, saw artillery shells exploding everywhere, lived in extreme terror. After coming back from the front, they developed all kinds of psychological reactions. Back then we called it **shell shock**. By World War II, the name changed to **battlefield mental disorder**. After that came a bunch of other names too. The overall trend: as the generality became more and more abstract, as it covered more and more things, we lost the ability to clearly understand what was actually happening underneath that label.\n\nAnd of course, by now you know what it's called: **PTSD**—Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Just hearing that term, you can't even begin to guess what a person went through. Maybe they got bitten by a snake. Maybe they watched their closest comrade get blown to pieces by an artillery shell on the battlefield. From these two examples you can see it: once language gets more and more abstract, more and more *general*, it starts to detach from reality. One thing the word represents ends up \"standing in\" for something completely different.\n\nSo what does any of this have to do with Ms. Joanna? She has a very obvious habit: she takes serious, absurd situations and gives them a different name. Like when classmates throw snack packaging on the floor, or when the classroom reeks of spicy strips, or when a student brings a snake into the room. Ms. Joanna, for whatever reason, won't say what actually happened. The first few things get lumped together as \"throwing unidentified objects on the ground.\" The smell in the classroom becomes \"an unusual odor in the air.\" And the snake? That's \"bringing in wildlife.\"\n\nWhat's the harm in this kind of language? I think the most obvious problem is that it makes you not know what actually happened, and it downplays how serious things are. Someone might say, what you say is what happened. But the problem is exactly this: in language that's overly *general*, one word or one sentence covers so many things that the *particularities* underneath it differ enormously from each other. This is, in fact, the essence of **polite talk and corporate language**—using words that sound neutral, that sound sophisticated, to cover up the terrible or ugly nature of what's really going on. These days, this kind of \"highbrow discourse\" has basically become the entry ticket to certain circles, **cutting people off from reality and stripping ordinary people of their voice**.\n\nI think how you talk matters enormously. Every single word deserves a second thought.",
    "coverImagePath": "uploads/2026/05/4b67e646-5f50-4255-8620-ae88f8ddd0ae.webp",
    "tags": []
  }
}