Does the language you use change the way you think?
As a writer and editor I’ve always believed that the words you use matter – that all synonyms are not created equal.
For example, if you were describing a traffic accident, would you say the cars contacted each other, hit, bumped, collided or smashed?
Psychologist Aldert Vrij describes an experiment in which participants watched footage of a traffic accident and then answered questions about what they'd seen, including 'About how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?' However, the question was phrased a little differently for each group of participants – with the word 'contacted' replaced with the verbs listed above. The average speeds estimated, in miles per hour, were contacted = 31, hit = 34, bumped = 38, collided = 39 and smashed = 41.
They all saw the same footage, but the words used changed how seriously they took it. In fact, a week later, they were asked whether they had seen broken glass at the scene. Although there was none, 32{ff6ca7b474dd05553048b910a34e7fba34d80f8847cae3051262c18ce766eaf5} of the people given the word smashed thought they had seen some.
If changing a single word can affect people's memories to that extent, then choosing your words carefully is more than a matter of pedantry.
In the US, gun control advocates are shifting to terms like 'gun-violence legislation' to avoid the negative connotations of 'control', while the term 'marriage equality' has gained ground over 'gay marriage'.
And it's not just individual words – the language you speak changes how you think about things.
You probably know that in many languages, nouns have a 'gender' – usually masculine, feminine or neuter. These are fairly arbitrary designations, and speakers would tell you it doesn't affect anything – after all, how can a table be male or female?
But it turns out these things are pretty ingrained. In a 2002 study, researchers asked native Spanish and German speakers to describe various objects. The word 'key' is feminine in Spanish and masculine in German. While German speakers used words like hard, heavy, jagged, metal and useful to describe a key, Spanish speakers used words like golden, intricate, little, lovely and tiny. A picture of a bridge, which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, was described by German speakers as elegant and slender, while Spanish speakers described it as strong and sturdy.
(More depressingly, countries that speak more heavily gendered languages also tend to rank higher on the global gender inequality index.)
This suggests that the move from chairman to chairperson, fireman to firefighter and male nurse to nurse is more than just good manners – it has a real effect on how readers picture the role.
