The Power of Language
My friend, the wonderful movement teacher and writer, Susan McCulley, wrote a post about how we use language that just floored me.
Susan asks, for instance, what if we substituted the word “aging” for the word “living?”
“She’s aging well,” becomes, “she’s living well.”
“It’s just my aging body,” becomes, “it’s just my living body.”
Years ago I heard this TED Talk by Jackson Katz, where he reframes the issue of intimate partner violence to focus on the perpetrator, rather than the victim simply by changing our language. Watch how our understanding of the problem changes when we substitute, “this many people are victims of sexual violence each year,” with “this many people commit sexual violence each year.”
When we change our language, though the facts may remain the same, the meaning shifts. In the case of “aging” vs. “living,” we may feel and think differently about ourselves just by changing our language. In the case of moving the perpetrator to be the subject, we shift our awareness towards the origins of the problem.
One word I’ve stopped using is “mastery.” There are so many stories in plain sight in that word. It implies dominance. It also implies finality, as if to master something is to be complete. I prefer the word, “fluency.” This word conveys more precisely what I ask of my clients: not mastery of the topic, the talk, the content, but fluency. Fluency not only sounds beautiful, it feels good to say. And, importantly, it does not mean domination of a subject, it means deep knowledge with room to grow and keep learning. As a fluent speaker of American English, my vocabulary is always growing, new words appear in our lexicon, new meanings emerge for known words.
Language is how we make meaning of our world, of our feelings, of what we see and hear, of what we believe.
This week, let’s analyze our own language, our own framing and phrasing. And, importantly, let’s listen deeply to the language of others, of news outlets, of teachers, of friends. Our job as communicators is not only to speak with clarity and truth, but to take responsibility for the assumptions our language and phrasing put forth.