Discrimination Against Words

With a title like, The Language War, I had honestly expected Robin Lakoff’s book to be as cryptic and confusing as Ramage’s deceptively simple titled Rhetoric: A User’s Guide. If anything Lakoff’s book is more of a tutorial on language than Rammage’s could’ve ever hoped to be, using easy to understand language and explaining its points clearly instead of dancing around the topic. Reading The Language War has caused several moments of “Oh, so that’s what so-and-so meant in that earlier text.”

The book has caused me to consider things about language that I never really thought of before. For instance, one short segment that struck me as interesting was when Lakoff made the statement that “The very dictionary has become overtly political.” This is something that I’ve never really considered before. To me, the dictionary is a cold list of words and basic definitions. Lakoff explains because of differences such as cultural, gender, societal and so on that words have different meanings when used in a different context or spoken to a different group of people. Because words don’t all have a single meaning anymore, the way a dictionary portrays a word may be incorrect to certain groups of people or the word may have uses that the dictionary has not defined correctly. Lakoff gives the example of an article by Torri Minton in the San Francisco Chronicle that talks about the widely popular Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defining the racial slur of “nigger” to mean “A black person” only later in the definition amending that it is offensive. This definition lead to obvious trouble with the African-American community. Lakoff goes on to explain why this is important saying, “the dictionary is our maker of meanings, our semantic arbiter: the definition in the dictionary states who you are, your identity still depends on how authority views you.” Today, Merriam-Webster has now tacked “Usually offensive” in front of their definition to rectify the problem. I found it astonishing that something as perceivably neutral as the dictionary was embroiled in the same language war as politicians and other persuaders. In retrospect I feel kind of dumb for not realizing this. If language shapes our reality, and the dictionary is our language, the dictionary is part of what creates reality.

I wasn’t very surprised when the topic of the dictionary resurfaced in chapter three of the book, “Political Correctness" and Hate Speech considering the very issue with the African-American community over the word “nigger” was one of “political correctness,” and that very example is used again in the chapter. Although the dictionary is supposed to be “impersonal” and “scientific” and perhaps strives to be so today, Lakoff brings up early dictionary writers such as Dr. Samuel Johnson using the dictionary for political agendas. The dictionary creates connotations for words that end up becoming frames for use in persuasion. Words like addiction bring to mind pictures of drugs and the word addiction implies an illness that a person cannot control, but not all addiction is an illness and many addictions are in no way related to drugs even though the dictionary cites these chemical abuses as part of the word’s definition.

This and other examples in The Language War have gone beyond what I perceived as using language for persuasion purposes, teaching me that no language is truly neutral. I think the concern with things such as the dictionary may be going to extremes to prove that everything has an unconscious political bias but I realize as I write this that by injecting my own opinion on the subject I too am skewing this very writing to my own personal opinions. I don’t see what’s wrong with that though, if it’s impossible to achieve true neutrality then why should we strive to do so? Why should we be concerned with political correctness if what we say or write could be twisted into whatever someone else wants it to be? I personally think there’s a line between purposefully aiming to insult someone or push a political agenda and doing so subconsciously or having your words taken out of context. I think a neutral, unbiased world would be a pretty dull place to live in, and while it’s good to read between the lines and find the true meaning, we should be cautious not to overreact.