Speakers and listeners must be careful in using and responding to the language of feeling. Such techniques can backfire if listeners believe you are trying to exploit their emotions. We should be equally careful, however, of euphemisms, words that numb our feelings by hiding rather than revealing reality. About a half century ago, the British writer George Orwell warned of a developing language of bureaucracy that can deaden rather than awaken feelings. Sadly, this danger has materialized in our time. The Minnesota Board of Education voted to consider requiring all students to do “volunteer work” as a prerequisite to high school graduation.
The medical establishment sometimes describes malpractice as a “therapeutic misadventure” and death as a “terminal episode.”Government planners may gloss over destructive or costly policy blunders by admitting, “Mistakes were made.”In such cases “mistakes” may vastly understate the blunder, and the passive construction, “were made,” allows the speaker to avoid taking responsibility or assigning blame. Similarly, “friendly fire” means killing your own troops by mistake, and “collateral damage” means bombs hitting civilian targets such as hospitals and schools. As Orwell noted, such language “falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.” Your ethical goal must be to avoid extremes of language that arouse or block feeling without justification.
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A final technique that helps awaken feelings, especially when the subject is abstract, is personification. Personification involves treating inanimate subjects, such as ideas or institutions, as though they had human form or feeling. In the late spring of 1989, Chinese students demonstrating for freedom marched in Tiananmen Square carrying a statue they called the “Goddess of Liberty.” They were borrowing a personification that has long been used in the Western world: the representation of liberty as a woman. When those students then had to confront tanks, and their oppressors destroyed the symbol of liberty, it was easy for many, living thousands of miles away in another culture, to feel angry and to identify with their cause. Personification makes it easier to arouse feelings about people and values that might otherwise seem distant.
