Do Words Matter?

TEXT kAROLINA guSTAVSSON IMAGE JOHAN LAm

Do words matter? Or rather to what extent do words matter? This all started as a simple google search, then before I managed to realize it, I had fallen down into a rabbit hole of linguistics and cognition. Come along and I’ll bring you on a journey through more open tabs than most browsers are designed for! part one of this article focuses on thought, in part two we dive deeper into the emotional and societal impact of words, and in the final part we consider the underlying psychology.

Part 1: Words and Thought

A word is defined as ‘a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing’, in essence, we can boil it down to meaning. For a long time, I’ve been curious about what influence our vocabulary has on the way we think. It becomes a typical hen and egg problem; do I think this way because of what I’m able to express, or do I express this because of what I think? Perhaps it’s an iterative process, where vocabulary and thoughts go hand in hand. If we reframe the question, can language be a limiting factor for thinking?

The debate whether or not language can limit thought is the age-old debate about linguistic relativity. Nowadays most linguists have concluded that it does to some extent, the weak version of the theory is accepted. The difference between the weak and the strong version is that in the former, thoughts and decisions are not determined, only influenced. The idea is that language can constrain thought to a certain degree.

There’s actually a word for things that can not be expressed: ineffability. Maybe we should all start communicating as bees do when we can’t express ourselves: with dance (imagine that)! Thinking can be sorted into recognizing, remembering, reasoning, imagining, emotion, and deciding. It might be more helpful to flip the question, what is thinking without words? Awareness, feelings, non-verbal reasoning (for example visual thinking), and abstract thinking (interpreting representation instead of literally). One concrete example of how language shapes our thinking is the way different cultures categorize colours. Some only have words for dark and light despite being able to see more colours. Or take red and pink, pink is a light red but you might consider them to be different colours. Perhaps we can consider language a tool that can form our thinking, structuring it. On the flipside, mastering a language does not necessarily mean that you can think. To prove this point, I let an artificial neural network (AI) write the next paragraph based on the text in this article.

"It’s very important that we can be aware of how we are thinking and doing in any given situation and learning to apply this into our lives. The difference is still that our thinking does not require language. If we are able to think without language we can focus on the feelings we have. It may feel very uncomfortable for some, it may make us feel uncomfortable and it may cause us to be withdrawn, isolated and reluctant to speak or express ourselves."

To conclude, you can’t think just because you can formulate cohesive sentences, but this doesn’t settle the original question. Unfortunately, the answer to ‘do words matter’ from this part is a meek maybe. Let’s continue our search and move on to part two, the societal and emotional impact of words.

Part 2: Societal and Emotional Impact

To start, can words be offensive? The simple answer is yes since we ascribe undertones and meaning to them. Slurs are an obvious example of this. But what about subtleties? According to one study of German job descriptions, men were thought to better fit for the job when a masculine job title was used, in contrast to when both masculine and feminine nouns were used in the job description. Another example is that some Spanish words have negative connotations in the feminine version of the word, such as ‘un hombre público’ versus ‘una mujer pública’. The former means influential man, while the latter means prostitute. Language is constantly evolving, it’s worth thinking about what belongs in a museum and how we want to shape the language of tomorrow. Language is like a cultural magnifying glass, highlighting our behaviour and values.

I reached out to Alena Ipanova, lecturer in the course Intercultural Competence and business coach, to hear what she had to say on ‘do words matter’. She emphasized the link between language, actions, emotions, behaviours and how we express ourselves - and how they sometimes contradict. People can mean the same thing or feel the same emotion but express it differently, by for instance tone of voice, contrasting actions or vocabulary. Another striking point she brought up was how one aspect of developing emotional intelligence is to adapt your language sensitivity. People can have different levels of emotional intelligence depending on whether they are speaking their mother tongue

or their second or third language. “Compared to native speakers we don’t have the same emotional connection, it can sound harsher when we translate from our first language.”

Let’s zoom out from culture and look at how we spread messages on a large scale. It’s time to consider persuasion, words matter when convincing. Nobody knows this better than the media and advertising industry. Think about a newspaper or an ad, in what ways do the words grab your attention? Some popular tactics employed here are a repetition of a simple message, fear, the bandwagon effect, association, intense language (Amazing! Wow! The best!), extrapolation (big conclusions), flattery, and glittering generalities (using virtue words and hoping that they are accepted without question). The next time you see an ad, I encourage you to notice what tactics they are using. Advertising loses a fair share of power when you start to dissect it piece by piece. We are now a little bit closer to a definitive answer to ‘do words matter’, it seems like they do. This brings us to the next part, psychology and the veiled philosophy behind linguistics.

Part 3: Rose is a Rose?

The American poet Gertrude Stein is famous for “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” with the popular interpretation that things are what they are. Similarly, there’s a famous line in Romeo and Juliet that goes “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. But are things perceived in the same way if they have different labels? The economist Sheena Lyegar tried to answer this in a small experiment. She’s blind, so when choosing a nail polish she asked the ladies at the salon to describe two light shades of pink to her. The shade ‘Ballet slippers’ was described as elegant and the shade ‘Adorable’ was described as glamorous.

The only difference the ladies at the salon could agree on was that if Lyegar could see she would be able to tell them apart. She decided to bring these nail polishes to the laboratory, removed the labels, and asked people which one they would pick. Here things get interesting, half of the participants accused her of putting the same shade in both bottles. When the labels were off the participants picked ‘Adorable’ and when the labels were on they chose ‘Ballet slippers’. So a rose is not necessarily a rose, the name matters.

The nail polish example shares similarity with art forgery, two seemingly identical paintings should in theory be perceived in the same way but the story matters! According to psychology professor Paul Bloom “When shown an object, or given a food, or shown a face, people’s assessment of it - how much they like it, how valuable it is - is deeply affected in what you tell them about it.”

After some pondering, I came to the conclusion that language is a toolkit for special types of thinking. The parallel here is programming languages, they all have different specialties adapted to different approaches to problem-solving. Language is for thought what singing is for music, not the only way, but nevertheless a great way to think. The stories we tell, both about each other and objects, and perhaps more importantly how we tell it, influences our perception of the world. Words matter!

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