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

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.