Pay Attention to How You Talk (And No, I Don't Mean Be More Polite)

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.

Let'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?

But 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.

Here'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.

And 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.

So 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."

What'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.

I think how you talk matters enormously. Every single word deserves a second thought.