EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was originally published as part of the Spring 2019 magazine.
A few weeks ago, I took a Lyft with a talkative driver, who asked me about the recent arrest of rapper 21 Savage for alleged illegal presence in the U.S. After a few minutes of discussion, my driver revealed that while he kept hearing about ICE on the news, he had no idea who they were. He would hardly be alone in such uncertainty. Adrift in the throes of the 24-hour news cycle, we must now process and attempt to understand a continuous flow of political information. Faced with this daunting deluge of names, numbers, and breaking stories, it becomes easier to just stop paying attention.
The political language we use only makes this problem worse. With little time and attention to spare, it is tempting to accept the conventional, ready-made words and phrases that dominate political conversations. Presented with a neutral-sounding acronym like ICE, the eye glides over it, passive and content. Even if we are ignorant of a term’s true meaning, there is rarely space left in the conversation to encourage education or further research. My Lyft driver certainly did not know that ICE stood for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, nor was he aware that the agency is a relatively recent political institution, only established in 2003—by no means entrenched or entitled to acceptance.
In his classic critical essay, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell argued that the individual words and the broader conventions of discussion we use play a large role in shaping our understanding of political reality, often in unseen or unacknowledged ways. At its worst, political language can obscure and confuse people, enabling us to gloss over uncomfortable or outright horrifying implications. Euphemism abounds, spawning convenient shorthands that stifle the possibility of conscious, intentional discussion, allowing us to avoid taking true responsibility for the things we say. As our political language begins to fail, weighed down by jargon, misleading terminology, and inexact codes that discourage critical thought, we lose the ability to cut to the heart of the matters we discuss. The consequences of sloppy and careless political language grow even greater when poor language intersects with other institutions of inequality and discrimination, a compounding effect acutely felt in conversations surrounding women and gender in American politics.
During the 2016 presidential election cycle, both casual and serious discussions of the contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump referred to the candidates as “Trump and Hillary.” This subtle, widely-accepted language convention, wherein the male candidate is usually referred to by his last name, but the female candidate is almost exclusively referred to by her first name, feeds into an implicit power imbalance that positions women as less professional and qualified. Insidious and infrequently examined with a critical eye, the use of such unconscious language choices harms perceptions and assumptions about female politicians’ legitimacy and authority. As Orwell highlights in his essay, the treachery of bad political language stems from its ease of use. Careless language tempts us with the offer of effort-free templates for our speech, replacing original thought with pre-made, self-perpetuating opinions and ideas. Stringing together oblique expressions and phrases long-emptied of real resonance, we get the satisfaction of “expressing ourselves,” even if we have not said anything.
Other inequitable trends in political naming happen at an intersection of gender and ethnicity, like the reduction of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s name to the acronym “AOC.” The acronym AOC raises the potential for all kinds of subconscious shifts in perception, rendering Ocasio-Cortez more impersonal and creating a potentially harmful distancing effect. Once again, laziness surrounding female names also emerges as a motivator, but here, the nickname “AOC” also erases her Latina heritage, a minimization of identity that signals a lack of adequately welcoming pluralism and respect for names from other cultures.
In light of an evolving Democratic presidential field for 2020 with many female candidates, improving awareness of gendered patterns of political language is critical. We cannot afford to be careless in political speech, as the language we use naturally shapes our ideas—without precise language, how can the policies and positions we describe be any clearer? The best way out is to cultivate deliberate awareness of the small, often innate language choices we tacitly accept and employ. Aim for precision, and be watchful about maintaining consistent standards, especially when speaking about politicians across common categories of social inequality. At first, such efforts may feel artificial, but this is not a bad thing—paying greater attention to how we use political language will necessarily increase mindfulness of the political topics under discussion. We may not be able to slow down the flow of political information we confront every day, but we must slow down to think about our political speech, and make a deliberate effort to use language that is reasoned, careful, and intentional.