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| By introducing changes in how we speak, the media often changes how we think. |
We tend to think of language as something posterior to thought. A
thought comes into your mind and then you find the right words to
express it.
Anthropologists and neuroscientists are currently doing some
fascinating work on the relationship between thought and speech and
have discovered that things are a little more complicated. Speech does
not merely proceed from our thoughts like a one-way street. Rather,
researchers have been finding that there is also traffic flowing in the
other direction: how we speak affects how we think about the world on a
level that our conscious minds may never even be aware. As psychologist
Lera Boroditsky put it in a Wall Street Journal article
summarizing some of this research, “the structures in languages
(without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to
express”.
There are fascinating examples of this from all over the world, but
the phenomenon is just as evident close to home. In the last forty
years, we’ve seen how the way people speak about unborn children (i.e.,
calling them “foetuses” or “lumps of tissue” instead of babies) has had
an unconscious effect on how so many people think about the ethics of
abortion. Or again, how we think about homosexuality has been enormously
influenced by pairing homosexuality with words that already had a
positive semantic range, such as gay. In David Kupelian book The Marketing of Evil,
he showed that these and many other language shifts did not just
happen, but arose out of a deliberate strategy for changing the way
Westerners perceive certain key issues.
The same thing is now occurring in the debate over same-sex marriage.
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