What's in a Word

​I’ve been thinking about words a lot lately: their nuances and significance. When we were elementary school age, one of my brother’s favorite things was “What’s in a Word,” a game his teacher used to help students understand how to recognize the linguistic roots of words so they could understand how words are spelled. My mother and brother would spend hours exploring the history of different words. Were the roots Arabic, Latin, or Greek; Spanish or French? Where did the stars and planets get their names? What were the original meanings of the word? What other words shared the same roots? What was the cultural significance of the word? They got so much joy exploring.

Journalists have a very particular relationship to words. Whether we’re telling you about a flood, the crash of the financial markets, or ducklings crossing the road, we want to tell a story. Even in this era of ethereal, unlimited space, our publishers and editors want us to do it using the fewest number of words. In fact, as the average reader’s attention span decreases, we are encouraged to use as few words as possible. Despite the popularity of long-form essays like Heather Cox-Richardson’s Letters from an American and the proliferation of treatises on Substack, we are led to believe less is more.

As a poet, I’m a big fan of using fewer words. My poetry demands constraint, and it’s from that discipline I’ve learned the difference between using fewer words and using the right words. Limitation of space often results in thoughtless, lazy reliance on time-worn euphemisms. For example, it takes little effort to use the word “minorities” to describe people, even though we are actually the global majority. It’s a throwback to white supremacist perceptions of the place Black and Brown people occupy in the world. Even in India and South Africa, where white people were the clear population minority, the term was/is used to describe Black and Brown folk. 

It’s with that perspective I’m questioning the media’s use of soft-landing words in this era of gut punches. Stories about pedophiles use phrases like, “underage minors” instead of “children” to describe victims. Kidnapping people from U.S. city streets and throwing them into prisons a world away is described as deportation rather than extraordinary rendition, implying a legal process has taken place that deemed an individual unfit to live in the country. Even the AP describes the genocide in Gaza as “the Israel-Hamas war,” as if Palestinians hadn’t been herded over the past two years, with U.S.-provided bullets and bombs, into locations where they are now being slaughtered as they simply stand in line to get food! As if there are two, equally capable and fully equipped, armies facing off. As if Benjamin Netanyahu didn't elevate Hamas by undermining and destroying Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)!

The future will not be kind to media of our current era. It will pillory the attempted silencing of Joy Reid, Mehdi Hassan, Ann Telnaes, 60 Minutes, and now Stephen Colbert because they were fearlessly direct in naming the Trump administration’s illegal overthrow of our constitutional systems and hypocritical use of religion. It will find solace in non-media sources, like Heather Cox-Richardson, who have used clear phrases, like rendition, to describe current events.

But this began decades ago. A coalition of segregationist Dixiecrats allied themselves with white supremacist Republicans to rebrand themselves as new conservatives, neocons. They invented euphemisms, like “pro-life” to fight against a woman’s right to live her life in line with her own beliefs, and “trickle-down economics” to hide the economic flood that would decimate the poor and working class. They redefined patriotism as unquestioning faith in the government’s involvement in one war after another. The media ran with these phrases, never asking "pro whose life;" never questioning the religious undertones of the phrase; never pointing out that a rising tide comes from below; never mentioning the right to question that's built into the very first tenet of the Bill of Rights; simply adopting these phrases as though they carried their own legitimacy.

The subsequent 1980s rise of spin doctors created a proliferation of words centrifuged to denude them of substance or meaning. The language of obfuscation has reigned ever since. And here we are, forty-plus years later, wondering how up became down and left became right.

In this era of blatant, unfettered oppression, we must be more precise with our words. What’s happening in Gaza is the intentional eradication of a people: genocide. And it’s being facilitated through a holocaust. The people named in the Epstein files are pedophiles, their victims were children. Donald Trump is a convicted rapist. ICE is carrying out illegal, extraordinary/extrajudicial renditions. 

I challenge my fellow journalists, to use the right words, not the easy ones. The future demands it.

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