A Rose by Any Other Name Won't Poll as Well

Great Debates
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On another thread, PunditLisa said:

There was an interesting bit in last week’s The American Prospect about the rhetorical victory of Republicans in changing “estate tax” to “death tax” in the popular conception. Mention was made of Orwell’s famous essay on politics and the English language (what was that essay called again?). I think it’s a valid point; they also note that some liberals had been trying to relabel it as a “wealth tax”–which is certainly more accurate, in the particulars, than “death tax”–but to no avail. The connotations of each–estate, wealth, death–are clearly different. After all, who’d be in favor of a measure which taxes “death”?

It just serves as a reminder to me that when you’re able to control what a thing gets called, you’ve won half the battle already. In fact, I think that’s what a lot of politics is: a struggle to set the bounds of debate. And the power doesn’t necessarily lie with the camp who can define the terms, but rather with the one who finds itself able to term the definitions.

Thoughts?

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The other usual reference is to family farms…even though they make up a small percentage of the folks affected by the estate tax.

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The best support to your claim is “partial-birth abortions.” Everyone squabbles over it, folks rush to ban it, when it’s such a minute part of the overall issue that it’s almost irrelevant. But since it sounds icky, nobody can support it…

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I think you are entirely correct Gad. No disagreements here.

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Ooh, check out an article in the current New Yorker called “The Word Lab” or something of the sort, which discusses this very issue of coining political buzzwords. Featuring the recently-reprimanded pollster Frank Luntz, of course!

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A lot of Noam Chomsky’s political commentary is along those lines. He’s a linguist, so he’s sometimes more interested in the language of debate than the debate itself. In Pirates and Emperors he argues pretty convincingly that the terminology used by the American media to discuss the Middle East situation is so loaded that it makes objective discussion pretty much impossible.

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Speaking of using words to your advantage.

I would suggest that a presidential candidate with all the same views as George W. Bush, but with a different name, would not have polled as well either…

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It’s ‘The Friendship Ditch!’

obscure reference to the film 'Speechless’

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Oh my gosh. A thread, however brief, that has actually achieved unanimity. Quick, someone say something dissenting!

The Prospect article I mentioned made reference to the politics of abortion language, too, and it strikes me that this is one area in which both sides have been able to coin the basic terms to their advantage (the invocation of “partial-birth abortions” notwithstanding, Drain).

The “pro-choice” folks get to imply that their opponents are against somehow against the concept of choice, and the “pro-lifers” manage to convey an affirmative valuation of life ostensibly missing from the other side. And actually, it’s less devious than that: if you’re pro-choice, you’re in favor of choice, and if you’re pro-life, you’re in favor of life. It’s win-win!

Of course, the more straightforward and objectively defensible terms for the two camps would be “pro-abortion” and “anti-abortion,” but neither have particularly positive connotations. Amiably irrelevant euphemisms it is, then.

David: Funny, sad, and true, all at once.

Dumbguy: Solomon and Lee do that, too, in Unreliable Sources.

Kimstu: I remember a similar article in The Atlantic Monthly recently. Do you know if there’s a link online?

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If I do, you’ll just claim I’m arguing semantics…

(wait for it)

<rimshot>

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Gadarene: *I remember a similar article in The Atlantic Monthly recently. Do you know if there’s a link online? *

As far as I can tell, all that the chiselers—excuse me, I meant to say the fine forward-looking capitalist benefactors at Conde Nast ;)—give you is a subscription site. But it might be worth picking up the current issue on a newsstand, not just for the “Word Lab” article but for the other politics-related ones; it’s this year’s “Political Issue” of the magazine. (“Clinton Looks Back” is the cover story.)

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And this is exactly why we have “pro-life” and “pro-choice” groups. They both wanna be depicted as “for” something. As well as being “for” something that sounds so virtuous.

Note: This is merely an example. This post should in no way be construed to be a jumping off point for a debate on the abortion issue.

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Lord knows, this is a very recent development; certainly we never had this kind of semantic shuffling about during the War of Northern Aggression. Er, the War Between The States. Er, the Civil War. Excuse me.

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Gadarene said:

Actually, I would disagree that “pro-abortion” is a “more straightforward and objectively defensible term” at all.

Most people who are pro-choice are definitely not pro-abortion. I know I’m not. But I am in favor of women having a choice on the issue.

Similarly, I am in favor of people having a choice on whether they want to smoke marijuana in their own homes. That doesn’t make me “pro-marijuana,” just pro-choice.

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The Atlantic Monthly is free: http://www.theatlantic.com. I haven’t figured out how to make the link show up in blue letters, but you can get almost everything in the printed version and forums as well. I don’t know why anyone pays to subscribe.

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No question, the way an issue is phrased in the media has a lot to do with how people react.

Here’s a different take on abortion-related phraseology.

Granted, abortion is a tough issue for a LOT of people. My sense is, only a tiny minority of people are rabidly pro-choice or pro-abortion, though it’s those die-hards who tend to dominate debate. Though polls may say that 66% of Americans are pro-choice and 33% are pro-life, those percentages don’t give us much nuance. That 66% includes a lot of people who find abortion repugnant and would condemn it in many/most circumstances. And the 33% includes a lot of people who’d support abortions under some circumstances. Moreover, a HUGE percentage even of self-proclaimed pro-choicers believe parents have a right to know when their children are seeking abortions.

So, given a complicated issue with numerous shades of gray in most people’s minds, let’s see how the media handled the parental notification issue:

When Congress was considering a law requiring parental notification when a minor girl had an abortion, what did the media ALWAYS call it? A neutral term like “the parental notification bill”? No, it was ALWAYS referred to as “the Squeal Rule.” Does that sound like neutral reporting, or like pro-abortion editorializing?

Another example I’ve used before. There are a LOT of angles to the issue of whether the US should build an anti-ballistic missile system (in space or elsewhere). Could it work? If it COULD work, would it be worth the expense? If it could work and was worth the expense, would it be a good idea or an unnecessary provocation? All tough questions, which make this a complicated issue, worthy of serious, respectful debate.

So… what have the media ALWAYS called the space-based ant-missile plan? Did they call it High Frontier (the original name General Daniel GRaham gave it)? Did they call it by the perfectly fine, perfectly neutral name S.D.I.? Nope… they always called it “Star Wars,” a not-so-subtle insinuation that the whole thing was one of Ronald Reagan’s childish, Buck Rogers fantasies.

As has been said before, winning the terminology battle is important. There’s no question that the Left nearly always wins the terminology wars.

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Margaret Thatcher’s late 1980s attempt to replace property taxes based on property size with one based on number of occupants (you can work out the problems with that yourselves) was based on an earlier mediaeval tax known as the poll tax. This had proved extremely unpopular. To get round this, Thatcher tried renaming it the community charge, but very few people used the new name.

It’s the flipside of the OP, I suppose; be careful that people can’t see through the words you choose.

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In the UK at least the right have historically edged the “language war”. In the 1980s the Conservatives seemed to have little trouble in creating labels for any opponents – the “loony left” in particular. Admittedly, some of the victims didn’t help themselves by fitting the stereotype neatly, but the Tories have always been better at emotive language than Labour (despite the latter’s attempts).

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In Minnesota, we have a Senate candidate running against both the “death tax” and the “marriage penalty.”

Does anyone define what they really mean by “family values” or “smaller government”?

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P.S. All of the bogus terms I listed in the above post were originated by the Right, not the Left.

P.P.S. Yes, right wingers also favor big government, but they don’t tend to count the size of the military, the prisons, the police, or the laws dealing with private morality. They also don’t count corporate welfare as real welfare, either.