Watching Out for Loaded Words

By Frank Trippett

Via eye and ear, words beyond numbering zip into the mind and flash a dizzy variety of meaning into the mysterious circuits of knowing. A great many of them bring along not only their meanings but some extra freight--a load of judgment or bias that plays upon the emotions instead of lighting up the understanding. These words deserve careful handling--and minding. They are loaded.

Such words babble up in all corners of society, wherever anybody is ax-grinding, arm-twisting, backscratching, sweet-talking. Political blather leans sharply to words (peace, prosperity) whose moving powers outweigh exact meanings. Merchandising depends on adjectives (new, improved) that must be continually recharged with notions that entice people to buy. In casual conversation, emotional stuffing is lent to words by inflection and gesture: the innocent phrase, "Thanks a lot," is frequently a vehicle for heaping servings of irritation. Traffic in opinion-heavy language is universal simply because most people, as C.S. Lewis puts it, are "more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them."

The trouble with loaded words is that they tend to short-circuit thought. While they may describe something, they simultaneously try to seduce the mind into accepting a prefabricated opinion about the something described. The effect of one laden term was incidentally measured in a recent survey of public attitudes by the Federal Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. The survey found that many more Americans favor governmental help for the poor when the programs are called "aid to the needy" than when they are labeled "public welfare." And that does not mean merely that some citizens prefer H/2O to water. In fact, the finding spotlights the direct influence of the antipathy that has accumulated around the benign word welfare.

Every word hauls some basic cargo or else can be shrugged aside as vacant sound. Indeed, almost any word can, in some use, take on that extra baggage of bias or sentiment that makes for the truly manipulative word. Even the pronoun it becomes one when employed to report, say, that somebody has what it takes. So does the preposition in when used to establish, perhaps, that zucchini quiche is in this year: used just so, in all but sweats with class bias. The emotion-heavy words that are easiest to spot are epithets and endearments: blockhead, scumbum, heel, sweetheart, darling, great human being and the like. All such terms are so full of prejudice and sentiment that S.I. Hayakawa, a semanticist before he became California's U.S. Senator, calls them "snarl-words and purr-words."

Not all artfully biased terms have been honored with formal labels. Word loading, after all, is not a recognized scholarly discipline, merely a folk art. Propagandists and advertising copywriters may turn it into a polished low art, but it is usually practiced--and witnessed--without a great deal of deliberation. The typical person, as Hayakawa says in Language in Thought and Action, "takes words as much for granted as the air."

Actually, it does not take much special skill to add emotional baggage to a word. Almost any noun can be infused with skepticism and doubt through the use of the word socalled. Thus a friend in disfavor can become a so-called friend, and similarly the nation's leaders can become so-called leaders. Many other words can be handily tilted by shortening, by prefixes and suffixes, by the reduction of formal to familiar forms. The word politician, which may carry enough downbeat connotation for most tastes, can be given additional unsavoriness by truncation: pol. By prefacing liberal and conservative with ultra or arch, both labels can be saddled with suggestions of inflexible fanaticism. To speak of a pacifist or peacemaker as a peacenik is, through a single syllable, to smear someone with the suspicion that he has alien loyalties. The antifeminist who wishes for his (or her) prejudice to go piggyback on his (or her) language will tend to speak not of feminists but of fern-libbers. People with only limited commitments to environmental preservation will tend similarly to allude not to environmentalists but to eco-freaks.

Words can be impregnated with feeling by oversimplification. People who oppose all abortions distort the position of those favoring freedom of private choice by calling them proabortion. And many a progressive or idealist has experienced the perplexity of defending himself against one of the most peculiar of all disparaging terms, do-gooder. By usage in special contexts, the most improbable words can be infused with extraneous meaning. To speak of the "truly needy" as the Administration habitually does is gradually to plant the notion that the unmodified needy are falsely so. Movie Critic Vincent Canby has noticed that the 'word film has become imbued with a good deal of snootiness that is not to be found in the word movie. Moderate is highly susceptible to coloring in many different ways, always by the fervid partisans of some cause: Adlai Stevenson, once accused of being too moderate on civil rights, wondered whether anyone wished him to be, instead, immoderate.

The use of emotional vocabularies is not invariably a dubious practice. In the first place, words do not always get loaded by sinister design or even deliberately. In the second, that sort of language is not exploited only for mischievous ends. The American verities feature words--liberty, equality--that, on top of their formal definitions, are verily packed with the sentiments that cement U.S. society. The affectionate banalities of friendship and neighborliness similarly facilitate the human ties that bind and support. The moving vocabularies of patriotism and friendship are also subject to misuse, of course, but such derelictions are usually easy to recognize as demagoguery or hypocrisy.

The abuse and careless use of language have been going on for a long time; witness the stern biblical warnings such as the one in Matthew 12: 36: "Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment." Yet the risks of biased words to the unwary must be greater today, in an epoch of propagandizing amplified by mass communications. "Never," Aldous Huxley said, "have misused words--those hideously efficient tools of all the tyrants, warmongers, persecutors and heresy hunters--been so widely and disastrously influential." In the two decades since that warning, the practice of bamboozlement has, if anything, increased. The appropriate response is not a hopeless effort to cleanse the world of seductive words. Simple awareness of how frequently and variously they are loaded reduces the chances that one will fall out of touch with so-called reality. --By Frank Trippett

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