I’ve known for a long time that words have consequences. I wrote a blog about it back in 2019, after yet another mass shooting in the US. I wrote another the day after the insurrection in Washington DC on 6th January 2021.
And here we are, three months away from the next US election, and again I’m seeing evidence that words really matter. Before announcing that he was not running for re-election, President Biden had been campaigning on the dangers to democracy should Trump return to power. But now that VP Kamala Harris is the presumptive nominee, there has been a change of language. Rather than talking about democracy, she is talking about freedom (using Beyonce’s song of the same name as her intro track).
On a recent Pod Save America podcast, Democratic messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osario explained why: ‘Democracy is too much of an abstraction for people to get excited about. Whereas freedom is corporeal. When you ask people for a salient example of having their freedom taken away, they will tell you oh, it’s being confined, it’s being chained, it’s being unable to move. It’s kind of a thing that you can feel inside of your body. Whereas, what is democracy? It’s just too nebulous.’
So, freedom resonates with voters in a visceral way, and it’s also the value that is most closely associated with the US as a country. Talk about having your freedom taken away, and people get it immediately. Talk about having democracy taken away, and people can’t feel it or picture it.
The Harris/Walz campaign is also majoring on two other words with positive consequences: joy and hope. The latter was very much an Obama word, but joy and joyful are very much associated with the two ‘happy warriors’ currently drawing huge crowds at their rallies.
Governor Walz himself was the first to come up with the adjective weird to describe Trump and the MAGA Republicans. He didn’t try to paint Trump and Vance as wannabe autocrats – he just called them weird, in a way that ordinary folk would understand.
Weird has an interesting history. It originally meant fate, as in destiny. But it was after the three witches in Macbeth were portrayed as strange or frightening in 18th and 19th-century productions of Shakespeare’s play that the adjective came to mean odd and disturbingly different. Now it means creepy and kooky – and definitely something that most ordinary people don’t want to be.
The impact of Walz’s use of the word weird has been so effective that other Democrats started using it as well. It’s a tough one to defend against – saying ‘I’m not weird’ is weird in itself. Weird has, in effect, gone viral.
I’m not making any political points here, just observing the impact of the considered choice of language, which continues to fascinate me. This is one of the reasons why I wrote a book about the significance of words.
How intentional are you about your choice of language? Does it align with your values? Does it resonate with your intended audience?
I love this quote by the author Yehuda Berg: ‘Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate, and to humble.’
Words have consequences. Use them wisely.
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