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Hello everyone, today’s broadcast is about the idiom ‘careless talk costs lives’ ,a saying popularised during wartime encouraging people to be careful to not divulge important information, especially if spies could be within earshot. However, I would also like to suggest that actually careful talk, especially overly careful talk, can actually be much more insidious and dangerous than initially thought.
What is Careful Talk?
Careful talk, at least in my sense of understanding, is the action of manipulating language to describe something in a particular way to elicit emotions or a reaction. However, this can also mean using words that mean the same thing, but elicit fewer emotions and lesser reactions. Words or phrases used are often more complex-sounding and therefore more emotionless, meant not to cause any visceral or immediate reaction. therefore we will not delve into the manipulative language used by some media, such as the decision between describing refugees as ‘illegals’ or ‘refugees’ or other terms relating to the issue, such as calling groups ‘swarms’ or ‘floods’, although that is worth looking into in its own right.
Lets provide an example of what I want to talk about:
‘Replacement Language’
In 2014, there were leaked internal training documents from automobile manufacturer General Motors(GM) revealed how engineers were told to avoid "judgement words", and replace them with other, more suitable words: ‘Defect’ was to be replaced with 'does not perform to design', and ‘problem’ was to be replaced with 'condition'. For some context, they were fined in the same year for having a deadly ignition switch flaw in some vehicles, leading to 13 deaths.
A Small Scenario
These differences might seem trivial in isolation, but they do seem to add up. Let me give you a scenario: You have to drive one of two cars for a long trip. You don’t know anything about the cars, but you have been given two descriptions, one for option 1, another for option 2. Which car do you take?
Option 1: This car has defects, and it has problems
Option 2: This car does not perform to design, and has conditions
I’ll add a poll down below for people to vote, but I’d wager that more of you would reluctantly prefer Option 2. ‘Does not perform to design’ could mean much more than ‘defect’, as a wider number of things fall under the former phrase. Defect is also more definitive, more scary. Defect, means something is definitely broken, with no ambiguity. ‘Does not perform to design’ can mean many things, maybe the designs are very ambitious? Maybe the heated seats don’t work? Maybe it still works fine, maybe not too broken. More vague, more wiggle room. I’d argue this is a perfect example of careful talk.
‘Problem’ also leaves little to the imagination. Problem means bad, there is no room for maneuver with the phrase. ‘Condition’ however, is a little more vague and less emotionally reactive than ‘problem’. A car in a condition may suggest that maybe it’s well travelled, has a lot of kilometers on the odometer, not necessarily that there’s something that needs fixing.
A New Term: Verbum Exporrectum
Since I haven’t seen an established term for this, I’ve heroically decided to step up and call this phenomenon Verbum Exporrectum ( Latin for ‘word broadening’[apparently], yeah I used Latin, this is a serious operation here) To help try visualize this branch of careful talk, or Verbum Exporrectum.
Imagine it is a cold day and you lay down on a couch. As it is cold you reach out for a blanket to keep yourself warm. At first the blanket is either scrunched up or folded. If you just took the blanket at it is and put it on yourself, it wouldn’t cover very much. But if you spread out, extended or broadened the blanket, you could cover so much more.
Now that we have a semi-official name for this, lets give some examples where Verbum Extensus can and has been used:
The Concerning Side of Careful Talk
The most sinister use of Verbum Exporrectum(VE) is in its application on serious issues, in order to suppress any outburst relating to the topic. One such area is when dealing with the topic of slums or the poor.
Everyone has some idea of what ‘slums’ are and the living situation in one. But most probably aren’t aware of how truly bad some areas in the world are to live in. Mike Davis’ planet of slums dives in detail of some of the worst living conditions in the planet: the incredible density of people in compact areas, the utter absence of any police force, utilities, sewage system or public service.The appalling conditions are only exasperated by the lack of support from local or even federal governments.
Some slums are so densely populated they are literally ungovernable, opening the door to some of the worst of humanity. With no support from anyone, people have resorted to child labour or even selling parts of their own bodies, such as kidneys . Without any governance, it has been documented that some people have kidneys stolen after death or even threatened with violence. In some areas the wages are so low, researchers don’t know how how the poor manage to survive, dubbed 'the wage puzzle'.
The word slums, while not perfect, carries the emotional and instinctive connection to the worst kind of housing situation. Of course, an image of a slum will evoke different images in every person, but the ‘range’, so to speak, of the quality of houses is small. Akin to a folded blanket, it doesn’t cover a wide range- and this actually a good thing in this context.
However, what is this situation often described as? ‘Low income families living in sub-standard housing’
Under this new umbrella term ‘sub-standard’, a much, much wider range of houses can fall under this term: from a shack in the slums, to a multimillion dollar mansion that is maybe slacking in some environmental standards: both could be seen as technically ‘substandard’, covered by the same blanket definition, and without more information, you can not be completely sure which one is being referred to.
One easy retort to this is that ‘sub-standard’ has a definition, and therefore the meaning hasn’t been lost. But I’d argue that the fact that it needs a definition, and it does not have that same ‘emotional’ gut instinct definition, is the danger here.
Now, low-income isn’t really defined here either. You assume its low, but without knowing how LOW it can actually be (aforementioned wage puzzle),your stance may therefore relax- the sanitization has worked.
The UK government has a section on its website about 'non-decent homes'. How do you interpret non-decent homes? To some, a non-decent home is one without a bathroom for every bedroom, or having a backyard. For some, running water and a roof over their head is decent. To fewer, it is a house without a marble top island in the kitchen. Like an unfurled blanket, These new terms cover a much higher ‘range’ of homes, diluting one’s imagination and therefore focus.
The Darker Side of Careful Talk
The most potent area for this kind of VE is in the military and arena of war, to reduce the emotional reactions of heavy news, downplaying the social and mental impact of war-related events, maybe even providing some justification on the side.
It is why wars are often called ‘conflicts’, and battles as ‘skirmishes’. They can be considered synonyms, but they don’t feel the same: At least to me, ‘wars’ seem like an all out, deadly thing, while a conflict feels less final, brutal; apocalyptic. The word ‘battles’ is often preceded by the word ‘bloody’, while skirmishes are often described by ‘brief’.
Invasions of other countries have become ‘interventions’ or ‘special military operations’ , drone strikes have become ‘targeted killings’ (More on this in a second), torture has become ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, and kidnappings have become 'extraordinary renditions'.
Drone strikes are worth a deeper dive into: they have often been called by the government as ‘targeted killings’, or ‘surgical strikes’, giving them an undue air of precision and accuracy, when in fact, the track record of civilians killed is murky at best.
One can even see multi-faceted layers of VE in this area:
it was revealed that a method for counting collateral damage was to in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants unless explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
Or in other words:
It was found that a method for counting innocent deaths was to count adult males in the explosion radius as the enemy, unless it was found to be wrong after they were already killed.
Every step of the way, whether it is the use of ‘collateral’, ‘military age’ (i.e. adults) , ‘combatants’, people have been dehumanized and minimized, being reduced to a metric or a tally- the life of these victims has been taken away in every sense.
Ending on a Brighter Note
Lets try brighten the mood for this final stretch. Among the engineering world, there appears to be a particular phrased that is used, which is seen as a joke within the industry. Here is SpaceX using the term:
‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ - rocket crashed and broke into pieces
Now, I wanted to treat this as an exercise and apply VE, or careful talk, onto the word ‘crash’- Here are some which I have found or thought of myself , vote in the poll below which one you think is best, and comment if you think of better ones!
Entry into negative Altitude
Lithobraking (similar to aerobraking, but using rocks instead)
Energetic Disassembly
Unexpected dismantling
Controlled Flight into Terrain (This one is REAL)
Unsustainable deceleration
Sup-optimal landing path
George Orwell wrote an essay touching upon this topic, and unfortunately I have only come across it just prior to publishing this broadcast, but you can read it here:
Here’s an extract his essay titled 'Politics and the English Language'
Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
You may be thinking that all of this can be countered by the reader reading up and learning about the definitions of these words to become fully informed. But be honest, how likely is that to happen? How often do you think people read beyond the headline before moving on the next thing that attracts their attention? Carelessness is careful talk’s greatest asset. And it’s not about changing the definition, the subject matter or the message- its just about removing the emotions and intuitive interpretations of what you are saying.
Ultimately, when using careful talk, the lack of clarity means you are speaking, but not saying anything- and maybe that’s the point.
Make sure to give this broadcast a coherence score!
That’s all from me for now, but stay tuned for future broadcasts,
This has been Kunga’s Written Radio,
Check out last week’s broadcast here →