Politicians are engineering language for their own purposes. We need to watch out, Unspeak author Steven Poole, tells Rosita Boland
In one of his less forgettable comments following 9/11, George Bush declared that the attack on the Twin Towers was perpetrated by "evil folks". Most people would think "folks" either live down on the American range, or are your innocuous neighbours, doing folksy, homely things such as baking cookies and mending fences. It was laughable, inappropriate and fey language, which suggested to the world that Bush had a very strange perspective on a horrible situation.
However, it wasn't long before the folks turned into terrorists, and Bush was waging his ongoing "war on terror". It's this phrase which Steven Poole, Guardian journalist and author of Unspeak, a book about the role of language as a weapon, sees as the single most successful phrase at manipulating public opinion on a complex conflict.
"The obvious example of this is the way Fox news channel in the US very eagerly adopted the phrase 'war on terror' for all their coverage of the Iraq war. Now the idea that the Iraq war was anything to do with the 'war on terror' was a particular point of view, very closely aligned with what the US administration was arguing," Poole explains. "But how can you have a war against fear, or a war against a tactic? It doesn't make any sense."
ONCE HE HAD started noticing the way language was being massaged by governments and filtered to an audience via the media, he saw it everywhere. "Look at 'climate change'," he says. "That was deliberately lobbied for to replace 'global warming'. These things started jumping out at me whenever I watched TV or read newspapers, and it occurred to me they were all functioning the same way: that they were trying to smuggle in a biased point of view without wanting to have an explicit debate. They wanted to pack the persuasion into the name, which is why I came up with the name of the book, Unspeak."
Poole, smart and smartly dressed, is explaining all this while fighting off the urge to disappear outside for a cigarette, and in between sipping tea at a Dublin hotel. He'd asked for "builder's tea", but as the hotel is on the grand side, what arrives is Assam leaf: clearly, to use Poole's own terminology, "Assam" is posh hotel 'unspeak' for builder's tea.
Highly contentious subjects such as abortion, the environment and torture all thrive on unspeak. Poole points out in his book that in the 1970s when campaigners came up with the phrase "Pro-choice", that it was countered - and trumped - with "Pro-life". "In a conceptual battle of moral ideals, 'life' easily wins out over 'choice'.
Are you a "Friend of the Earth"? No? Then, by definition, you must be an enemy of the earth and not care about the environment. Are you a prisoner in Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo Bay? You may have experienced the "stress position". That's nothing to do with working at your desk, it's when you're hung from a ceiling by your shackled wrists. According to the US government, this is not torture, it's "abuse".
'EVERYBODY KNOWS IT'S torture but they won't say it. Even the media won't often say it. They'll say it's abuse and that feeds into an assumption that it wasn't a systematic policy," Poole says. "If a media organisation says of pictures from Iraq, it's from the 'war on terror', it tends to condone one point of view on the argument and makes it very hard to argue the opposite point of view. There's a crescendo of unspeak whenever matters of violence come to the fore, because I think you have to work very hard rhetorically to overcome people's natural disinclination to accept violence. It's about trying to deaden their mind with bureaucratic terminology."
So does he think unspeak works? "I think in many respects it does work. Most of us are very busy and we rely mainly on journalists and reporters to tell us what's going on. And if they're too busy to unpack this language for us, and just repeat it, then it does seep into the unconscious. And there's clear evidence of politicians deliberately engineering this language for their own purposes. But none of what I've written in the book is secret. It's all in the public domain. Persuading people stealthily of a point of view has probably been around for as long as there's been politics."
Unspeak by Steven Poole is published by Little, Brown (£9.99)
Unspeak: the digested read
Abuse (of political prisoners) - torture
Legitimate force - torture
Stress position - torture; prisoners are suspended from ceiling by shackled hands
Homicide bombings - suicide bombings
War on terror - let's flatten Iraq
Servicing the target - killing people
Collateral damage - killing people
Surgical strikes - killing people
Ethnic cleansing - killing people
Smart weapons - weapons that kill people (only the bad guys get hurt with these!)
Clarification - a politician contradicting their earlier statement; otherwise known as denial, lying
Climate change - global warming
Natural resources - a clever term which says: hey folks, don't worry, the oil will never run out, because it's a natural thing, so it's okay to drive SUVs
RB