Against the spin ... how about language reform, too?

We live in times of more information, ease of access to it and less truth than ever. As I do my various works I find myself caught in this dilemma as do my friends and clients. My work is clarification with individuals, groups and organisations through psycho-therapy, coaching, group facilitating, training and just plain talk. This is mainly language work and it gets harder and harder as our capacity to describe declines with a declining public vocabulary - the embedded vocabulary and syntax of spin.

For example:

Mercy Ministries staff address the issues that the residents face from a holistic client-focused approach; physical, mental, emotional. The program is voluntary and all aspects are explained comprehensively to the residents and no force is used. Executive manager of programs, Judy Watson in The Age (March 17, 2008).

Take out the “Mercy Ministries” and you have a description of all manner of well-being establishments operating on diverse, if not opposed, underlying philosophies and practices. Try the language of our governments on health, education, transport ...

I know I am not alone in this plaint. The Age business back page has a spin editor (David James) every week or so, and opinion articles and letters to the editor ring with calls for straight speaking, real FOI, unscripted public interchanges.

Don Watson says of this world “It enrages, depresses, humiliates, confuses. It leaves us speechless”. (Death Sentence, pg. 3).

My concern is that we may have moved on to a point where we are no longer so offended by its intentional meaninglessness. We have become comfortable with it, taking it for meaning and resisting facts or feelings which conflict with our comfort. This may be one source of some of the spontaneous childish rage reported daily in the press.

Explicit in Watson’s work, and implicit in some commentators (Sean Carney and Mungo MacCallum, Paul Krugman, George Will and others in the US and UK), the main danger of weasel words is loss of public truth. We are seeing this loss in a number of public language domains - international (the “war on terror”), environment, economy, education, health and so on.

The “facts” are often reported within oppositional intellectual frames - “left” and “right”- which preceded them. And what cannot be disavowed to the responsibility of others (the Opposition, and so on) is veiled in spin.

I look forward to the major news outlet which explicitly attempts to present the full picture that any particular event inhabits. What it would look like to do so will be the subject of another article, but a sketch is provided later here.

Correcting spin is a moral/political guts issue. Reducing weasel words is a personal discipline and caring for your message issue. They overlap of course. The distinction between public and private language is important, since it is in the spaces between them that new public expressiveness and expressions can emerge.

For example, the commercialised worldview which occupies the public expression of most contemporary Anglophone organisations is well understood by the denizens of such organisations to be window dressing, if not deception with intent. So, there’s a naturally occurring potential resistance movement cooking quietly in the institutional underbrush (public and private sector): people want to engage but are wary of the next “change” in the continuous improvement/increasing productivity cycles to which we are repeatedly subject.

However, the advance is slow and small in comparison with the despair-inducing weight of the growing “facts” in these life domains: safety, environment, economy, health/wellbeing and self/family. And how we are to resolve the shimmering conflict between our consummate productivities and our evident unhappinesses remains beyond the speaking of most public commentators, leave aside our public leaders. Efforts to do so are quickly labelled pessimistic.

So what to do now? One approach is to build workable truth relationships through which to share the “facts” as you discover and articulate them. These would be existing relationships at work or in personal associations of various kinds (sports, religious, community groups). You could add a focus on linguistic reform to their everyday activities - for example you could work on a few weasels like:

1. expressions of personal accountability, for example: “whatever” replaced with an explicit expression of feeling about the relationship at that moment; “It’s all about …” replaced with statements of the actual undertaking or intentions, and so on;
2. assertions about matters of public concern - especially environmental, health and educational - which present the whole picture of the issues, or the reliability/validity constraints of the unknown features of the evidence about them;
3. challenging uses of business-speak which obscure real differences, for example: “customer” for patient, student, etc.; “assets” for human capabilities, relationships, etc.; “business” or “industry” for activities which are certainly not businesses or industries (education, health, law); “market” for relationships which are not transactional (student, patient, …);
4. interrupting premature closures in discussions and meetings, for example: “at the end of the day …”, “the reality is …”, “the truth is …”, “the fact is ...”, etc. - by presenting the discussed and unresolved content as dilemmas or uncertainties which pre-mature closure denies; and finally
5. by setting ourselves personal objectives (arrgh!) of weaselly ones to be banned from our own talk and writing, Try, for example, to delete the many variations of “moving forwards”, “moving on”, “going forwards” from your daily language.

If you work in an organisation, invite your colleagues to assay with you the weasel words which most especially contribute to stultifying the realities you are trying to deal with. And if you feel energetic, let me know the results.