TED Radio Hour - They/Them, LatinX, Rigged: The history behind three words

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

Words are never just words. They carry context and controversy; they can signal identity or sow discord. This week, TED speakers explore the history and politics of our ever-evolving language. Guests include linguists Anne Curzan and John McWhorter, social psychologist Dannagal Young and writer Mark Forsyth. TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at: plus.npr.org/ted See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

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From TED and NPR. I'm Manushe Zamorodi. This week, we're telling the stories behind words that have become controversial. But let's start with some background and Shakespeare. It's Act 3, Scene 3 of Romeo and Juliet. Listen closely to the Bard's use of pronouns. Rise, why? knocks? Could Romeo hide

thyself? How they knock? Who is there? Notice anything? One person is knocking, but the friar remarks how they knock. There's not a man I meet

but doth salute me as if I were their well-acquainted friend. This is from a comedy of errors. Antiphilus explains how popular he is. Every single man greets him as their friend. Even when we fast forward

a couple centuries to Jane Austen's pride and prejudice. Perhaps it would have been better, but to expose the former faults of any person without knowing what their present feelings were seemed unjustifiable. Yet again, Jane Bennett graciously gives the benefit of the doubt to a person before judging them. For centuries, the pronoun they, them, has been used to refer to a single person, but the Debate over that usage, that is new. You have walked into one of my favorite topics.

I have devoted much of my scholarly career to thinking about the history of singular they. This is Anne Curzan. She's a professor of English linguistics at the University of Michigan. I sometimes get into arguments with people where they will say to me, but it can't be singular. And I will say, but it is. And they say, but it can't be. And I realize this is actually not an interesting argument. And it's not interesting in part because the data are totally clear. We say things such as someone who knows where they're going should give us directions, singular they. And as a historian of the language, what I discovered is that you can find those examples of singular they back hundreds and hundreds of years. Then recently, we have seen the rise of non-bushableness.

binary singular they. And it turned out that the non-binary singular they is what persuasively changed a lot of usage guides. That you saw usage guides say in order to be respectful of people whose pronoun is they, we need to allow singular day. How much do you feel that there is a subtext, though, to questioning the use of they, them as a singular? I think you're absolutely right that the debates here can get heated because the stakes can feel high for people. Whenever someone says it's just words, I would say your antenna should go up because it's rarely, if ever, just words. Words are some of our most powerful tools to hurt and to heal, to include and to exclude, to respect and to disrespect.

And when it comes to pronouns, it's fundamentally respectful. If someone's pronoun is they, then out of respect, you use they as their pronoun. And I will sometimes hear a couple of counter arguments that I think are worth addressing. The first counter argument I hear is a pronoun cannot be singular and plural at the same time. Now, this is a fascinating argument to make about English, because English already has a pronoun that is both singular and plural at the same time, and that is the pronoun you. Mm-hmm. The second counter-argument I will sometimes hear is that they can be ambiguous, which is

completely true. But all pronouns can be ambiguous. So if we take a sentence such as my mother and her friend were in the driveway and they said, Mm-hmm. It's ambiguous. is that both of them said, or does your mother's friend use the pronoun they? Does your mother use the pronoun they? We don't know. But if I said my mother and her friend were in the driveway and she said it's still ambiguous because did your mother say that or did her friend say that? Pronouns can be ambiguous. We get away with it in speech most of the time because the context will help us. And in writing, we need to go back and clarify. It's one of the reasons we have to. have to be careful as writers. We need to be careful with they. We need to be careful with all the

other pronouns, too. Has that always been the case with language that it sort of is used as a way of talking about politics without really talking about politics? We are constantly negotiating our relationships as humans. That's why this becomes so loaded in terms of the debates. Why are people feeling so angry when it's just do we use this word or that word? And I think a big piece of that is the debate is really about who gets to decide which words are okay and which words aren't okay. And that's about power. And that's why that debate gets so hot. Language can feel very loaded these days. New words pop up all the time. I use the term Latina. And sometimes Sometimes I use the term Latin X.

Old words become rallying cries. Raise your hand if you think the election could actually be rigged. Almost everybody in the room says the election could be rigged. And the evolution of some words ignites controversy. People will say they, them, pronouns, they're made up. Everything's made up. All words are made up. But what if we slow down and delve into the genesis and stories behind specific phrases?

If we better understand why some people use certain words, while others absolutely will not, can we better understand each other? Today on the show, They Them, Latinx, and Raked. The history and politics behind three words, with a less heated, more nerdy approach. Anne Curzan's new book is called Says Who, a kinder, funner usage guide for everyone who cares, about words. And yes, she says funner. She describes herself as a wordy, someone who celebrates the evolution of language. I have studied how English got from Beowulf to texting. It has changed a huge amount. And people are often interested in the facts that I know about very early forms of English.

For example, English used to have grammatical gender. All nouns, including inanimate nouns, were masculine, feminine or neuter, just like German, French. We lost that system. I never hear anyone lamenting that. People are interested that silly used to mean nice and that lollygag used to mean fool around in the kissing sense of fool around. But then I'll say, you know, now unique means very unusual, not just one of a kind. And there are people who say, no. That should not happen. But it is happening because language is always changing. Obviously, we've gotten all these words related to social media and texting, even the verb to text or slack me.

All of these are new and they're related to the technology that we have in the same way that airplanes created new words and the telegraph created new words. You sound delighted by all this. Why don't you feel threatened by any of it, I guess? I am delighted by it because what we're seeing is human creativity at work. I would encourage us all to adopt the mindset of a bird watcher or a birder, which is that when you hear something new in the language or something that's unfamiliar to you, to be curious about it, to ask questions, where does that come from? What's going on there?

part of human creativity created that, as opposed to wanting to kill it. It's really a question of attitude. Are you bothered by language fads and language change? Or do you find it fun, interesting, something worthy of study as part of a living language? Here's Anne Curzon on the TED stage. So here is Dean Henry Alfred in 1875, who is very concerned that desirability is really a terrible word. Here is Samuel Rogers in 1855, and he says, as if contemplate were not bad enough, balcony makes me sick.

These complaints now strike us as quaint, if not downright, adorkeable. But here's the thing. We still get quite worked up about language change. I will be honest with you. I do not like the word impactful. But that is neither here nor there, in terms of whether impactful is becoming common usage and becoming more acceptable in written prose.

What I'm saying is we should be less quick to decide that that change is terrible. We should be less quick to impose our likes and dislikes about words on other people. And we should be entirely reluctant to think that the English language is in trouble. It's not. It is rich and vibrant

and filled with the creativity of the speakers who speak it. I mean, you must draw the lines somewhere. You are an extremely incisive writer. I would dare say your sentences are very impactful even. Are there places where you just think, you know, it's not a question of evolution of language. It's a question of precision of language. Part of being an effective speaker or writer is caring deeply about how you use the language. So I hope we can move away from using language like right and wrong, which usually are not

linguistically justified, and talk instead about clarity, precision, audience, purpose, rhetorical effectiveness. And that's the way I teach. So I'm an English professor, and one of my responsibilities is to make sure that students control the kinds of language that they want to control and should control. or may need to control to have access to particular kinds of jobs or opportunities. But I don't do that as this is the right and proper way to use language and everything else is wrong. I say this is a formal, standardized, highly edited form of written language.

This will give you right now access to particular things. But you're absolutely allowed to ask, says who? Where did that rule come from? Do I need to follow that rule? because, of course, we could think about singular they, where I was taught, I wasn't allowed to use singular they, but as a linguist, as I learned more about it, I made the rhetorical choice, I'm going to use singular they. I'm going to quote unquote break the rules because I think it's important to do so. I think the rule is unjustified. And I'm going to use singular day. But I needed to be informed to realize I had that choice. That's Anne Curzan. Her book is Says Who, a kinder, funner usage guide for everyone who cares about words. You can see her full talk at ted.com.

On the show today, language, words, and politics. I'm Manus Zamarote, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. Hey, before we get back to the show, I want to tell you about our next bonus episode for TED Radio Hour Plus. It's with Elua Arthur, the only person I have actually enjoyed talking to about death. Aulua is a death dula. She was on our episode called Relationship Repair. But we asked her to come back to talk specifically about the best way to approach a conversation with a parent or other loved one about what they want at the end of their life.

Aulua makes a tough topic like this so much easier. If it's something that's been on your mind, do check out this bonus episode on Wednesday. Not a Plus supporter yet. Join your fellow listeners for bonus content and all our episodes sponsor free. Just go to plus.npr.org slash TED or give it a try right in the Apple Podcasts app. And thanks. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamorodi. And today, the history and politics behind three words. So we have talked about the they-them pronoun and its long history.

But now let's talk about words that haven't existed until recently. These days, there are attempts to forge new vocabulary. There are new ways of being polite in language that if they're not ingrained in you, if you're past a certain age, can be, difficult. This is linguist John McWhorter. I teach linguistics and music history at Columbia University. He also writes a weekly column for the New York Times where he dissects our use of language and sparks heated debates in the comment section. He's become a bit of a controversial figure. I switch hit, really, between linguistics and then in doing commentary on societal matters. And the truth is that the intersection between those two things is much thinner than many people think.

That crossover between linguistics and social change is embodied in a particular term, he says. Latin X. Do you remember the first time you saw the word Latin X? Yes, I do. I had a student in one of my American studies seminars who was Latina, if I may, and she wrote me a paper about Latinx. I had not heard of it. I believe the year was, let's call it, 2016.

And I'm 58. I grew up with Hispanic as the term. And then seemingly very quickly, around, I guess, 1990, in my experience, the idea was that we were to say Latino. But it's been hard not to notice that a great, many Latino people still say Hispanic, or you hear older people saying Spanish. And then today we have this other development. And Latinx is based on an idea.

that you want to move people away from thinking about the gender binary. And in a language like Spanish, the O ending is masculine and the A ending is feminine. So the idea is that instead of saying Latino or Latina, you just say Latin X, with the X covering both masculine and feminine. And the idea is to get beyond the gender binary, which is a concern of increasing centrality in our culture. But as you have pointed out, the Pew Research Center has done a number of surveys. on this term among Spanish speakers. I think the last one was in 2021. And they have found that even though about a quarter of these people had heard the term Latinx, only about three percent preferred to use it. Yeah. Latinx is an interesting idea. But the simple fact is that the vast

majority of Spanish speakers are not on board that we should think of sex differences as not really existing and being completely culturally constructed. And then also, I would say, the X is unideal because it doesn't sound Spanish and X is considered a rather odd letter. That's not how Spanish usually works. Spanish likes to have vowels at the ends of things often. Some people would prefer Latinei because that sounds more like Spanish than the X and looks a little less icky on the page. So yeah, it's not going to catch on beyond a certain crowd. And when you say a certain crowd, could you be a little more specific? Yeah, I know.

It has become part of the progressive agenda to suppose that suggesting and even trying to impose new terminology is part of making people think differently and therefore changing the world. Yeah, but some of those people that like your student, might say, well, this is how we change. We start to use language that strikes people to their ear as different. They start to want to understand why. We start to question it. We open up conversations. And this is how progressives want to progress our society. That student would certainly have said that. And unfortunately, it would be nice if that's the way language changed. But it usually doesn't. And that is John's thesis.

Society has to be ready, primed for new language, not the other way around. This idea is at the heart of a talk he's been giving to college students called word wars, wokeism, and the battle over language. Language changes, but these days, one must be very careful, an awful lot of the time. And we often have a sense that the terms change faster, then we can keep up with. Here's John McWhorter speaking recently to students at Claremont-McKenna College. And I want to unwrap what a lot of that is about and what it isn't about. And I want to point to a direction for perhaps a more constructive future.

And what it comes down to is basically that language changes. There are ways that language changes when society is changing. And that in itself can be a good, There's nothing wrong with new terminology emerging. And so, for example, there was a time when it was considered a novelty and by some people kind of annoying to have to say chairperson instead of chair man and chairwoman. I think we've gotten past that. Some terms make it, some don't.

African American, those of you who are under a certain age cannot imagine how odd that sounded in 1989. It happened in like two days. You were black one day. Jesse Jackson got on TV, and all of a sudden somebody is calling you African-American. And I'm thinking, I'm from Nigeria, but it became widespread very quickly. It's a little weird, but it's catchy. It had good intentions.

It was pushed by the proper people, and it happened very quickly. Oriental to Asian was very similar. One day, you said Oriental as a very progressive person. next day, everybody around you was saying Asian. I remember when it was. It was the spring of 1987. Asian. Boom.

Well, it works. There was something pleasantly global about the term Asian. Oriental sounded kind of like it referred to food. It was time for something else. But there's something else happening these days that is, in my view, worrisome. And it's worrisome because it doesn't help people. It's proposed as a way of helping people, but it doesn't actually. And that is prescribing that language changes before thought and assumptions in society

have moved in that particular direction. Many people are telling us that in order to change the way people think, you have to change the way people talk. And that can sound unexceptionable. That can sound perfectly rational. But the truth is, that doesn't actually work. Many of these new terms are embraced wholeheartedly by a certain group of people. Roughly, you could say that it's one-part academics, one-part activists, and one-part artists.

At the risk of opening up a whole can of worms, what are the roots of the thinking that if you change language, people will come along as well? well. A lot of why people think that the words you use will change thought is because of an idea that gets around out there. It's the Sapir-Worff hypothesis that people's languages and the way their words cover the world and the way their grammars work shapes the way you think, that it channels your thought, that to be Italian is to see the world differently than if you are German or if you speak Arabic, not only because of culture, but because the language makes you see things in a certain way. That is valid to a small extent that you can detect with little flitters of difference in highly artificial psychological experiments. And so, yes, it seems to be true

that Russians do perceive blue a tiny bit differently than the rest of us because they have two words for it, and most of us only have one. But the thing is, the effect is very small, and there's no evidence that the way your language works basically has you seen the world through a whole different set of glasses and you're on a different acid trip than the rest of us. Psychologists in particular have done really fascinating experiments, but they don't show that to speak Spanish means that you see the world differently than to speak English. And I think that's at the root of the idea that if you say unhoused, then you'll see homeless people differently. I get it. I completely see where people get that. But the truth is that the Superior Wharf hypothesis

has been vastly oversawley. Yeah. Unhoused versus homeless is a very interesting example. So there's an idea that a person should not be defined by their condition. So if they don't have a home, they are unhoused rather than a homeless person. What are your thoughts on that? I understand where it's coming from. But after you reach, I'm going to sound like get off of my lawn, but after you reach a certain age, you have living memory of how the new term is just going to sound like the old term after a while.

And so I remember in the 70s, you would see someone who's living on the street. My mother would refer to that person, and this was a neutral term, that person was a bum. But frankly, give it about 50s. 15 years, an unhoused person is going to have the same resonance as bum and homeless person do now. Rather, one should be working on homelessness. It's a tragic problem. What you call it is of much less importance, and when you try to change the term, you'd better be ready to make something else up in about 20 years.

I guess what's also very interesting right now is that no matter what, when these words change, they are. seized upon by different political parties. Because I believe on NPR itself, if you are, they now use unhoused instead of homeless. But I'm guessing someone would say, see, look, liberal bias right there. It's in the language that they use. They are trying to brainwash us by changing the language we use. Or on the other side, someone might say they just use the word homeless. What is wrong with NPR?

Why aren't they up to date on how we are changing the way that we talk about people who don't have a roof over their heads? That's one of those things, yeah. The new prescriptivism is mostly from the left, and it's based on an idea that you can change thought and maybe even policy by changing the way people talk about things. But the question that I think needs to be asked more is, given that the civil rights leaders who accomplished so much, and created the world that we live in today, imperfect though it is, we're so much less concerned with terminology. What is it that we've got on them? Why is it in advance to be concerned so much with terms rather than with getting out and changing the world? And I'm not sure I understand the justification if Dr. King and Bayard Rustin and Diane Nash and Shirley Chisham

didn't need to think about what you call things, and instead they were doing what they did. Were they getting something wrong? Would more have happened if they had been telling us which words to use? And I'm not sure that people have an answer to that question. Maybe the answer would be that the issues are more complex now and that therefore we need to think more about how we say things. But notice that that doesn't go through. There is a certain ease in calling for new terminology. And it's easy to call for it. And it's easier to call for it now that it used to be because we've got our phones. You can get the word out very quickly. You can do a substack. You can do a podcast. You can do TikTok. You can get the word out that now we're going to say it differently.

But isn't that a little easier than grassroots activism and trying to accomplish things through the mechanisms of legislation, which is slow, difficult and frustrating work? but it's easier to say that change doesn't happen than to acknowledge that it happens slowly. I think that these vocabulary changes are an attempt to make it go faster or to feel like you've done something. But the thing is, it doesn't really do anything in the real world that I can identify. And I'm not sure that the civil rights leaders of your would disagree with me. I'm not sure what we have on them in that sense. That's John McWhorter. He's a professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He also has a podcast called Lexicon Valley. You can see his TED Talks at TED.com. You can also see the full talk he gave at Claremont-McKennac College over at ted.npr.org.

So we've heard how the meaning of a word can change and evolve. But how does a word become a weapon? So saying, the election was rigged, they stole it from us. This is Danigal Young. She's a communications professor and has a new book. I do. The book is called Wrong, How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation. Danigal studies how words and language can be used, not just to spread information or misinformation,

but how words can become a slogan, a shorthand, for a way of seeing the world. If you think about, for example, the word rigged, okay? Just the word rigged. Centuries ago, Rigg would have conjured up images of fishing boats and freight. Like hooking up some kind of wire or fishing apparatus. Later, it started being used to imply that something, usually an election, is fraudulent, a setup. There's bad actors.

It's not the honest results. And now, when Trump repeatedly use the word rigged over and over, and not just in the context of matter-of-fact discussion, but in very emotional identity-activated conversations. They're trying to rig this election. Danigal refers to this linking of a word with another idea or emotion as joint activation. That kind of hardens the connection between them. That the Democrats are trying to rig this election.

Heard repeatedly, it becomes synonymous with a belief system. It is so rigged. The whole thing is rigged. And for some, a rallying call. And they steal it. And it's rigged. So now you have not just the joint activation of rigged with election, rigged with election with Trump,

but also the activation of outgroup threat, because now he's tying it to they stole it from us. So now that's. notion of rigging is done against us by them, all of that becomes not just reinforced in our minds, but repeated over and over. It's repeated in Fox News. It's repeated in the opinion shows on many levels. The system was rigged against me. It's repeated on the one American network in newsmax. It's already rigged. It's repeated by your friends and family who, because of polarization in the U.S. will tend to share your political views.

It's repeated by your neighbors who also because of geographic sorting will tend to, right now, hold your political views. That kind of chronic activation turns that word into an entire sort of treasure trove of meaning and identity. The word in some ways becomes owned by a particular group of people. Take the example of when a Democrat recently. There was this situation in California when a representative there, Katie Porter, after she lost in the Senate primary, she claimed that billionaires spent millions to rig the race. And that really seemed to confuse people saying, like, wait, what? Democrats using the word rigged? And later, she said she regretted it. So obviously, I wish I had chosen a different word.

The fact that she felt the need to apologize, that is not only fascinating from sort of a social science standpoint, but it also suggests that she recognized that she activated the wrong associative network in memory. You know, right. He's like, I jumped in the wrong pool of that word. In a minute, Dana-Gal-Young explains the link between words, slogans, and an appetite for misinformation. We don't actually want the truth. On the show today, the history and politics behind three words. I'm Manoosh Zamoroti, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.

Stay with us. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoosh Zomerode. On the show today, the history and politics behind three words. We were just talking to social scientist, Dana Gowell Young, about the history. the word rigged. Danigal says Trump's supporters latched onto that word

because it explained the unimaginable. The idea that how could Trump possibly have lost? Oh, well, he didn't lose. The election was rigged. Now, that understanding, that comprehension does not need to be empirically accurate

for us to feel satisfied. The power of one word to signal so much. You write that this ability to target people with language so quickly and so relentlessly is relatively new. Was that not possible, say, 50 years ago? I firmly believe that that is true. Not only in terms of our political identities, driving our behaviors, you know, with conservatives wanting to embody the norms of their team and liberals wanting to embody the norms of their team, but also because the media environment

was so different, right? 50 years ago, you had, you know, three major networks and that was about it. And the gatekeeping authority of your legacy journalism outlets was very strong. And so you didn't have that same sort of porous, connected and grassroots information infrastructure that can be wonderfully democratizing for social movements, but can also be a conduit for misconduct. information. Like, that point that you said, like, you know, three networks, the news is the news. That's what you get. So people were looking for, you know, what happened in the world. But now you write that they're looking for something very different. What are those things? Yeah, this does not sit well with most people. People are like, no, I just want to know the truth.

Unfortunately, no, you don't. I don't either. We don't actually want the truth. Once a particular social identity is salient in our mind, then our motivations to understand the world are very much going to be driven by that social identity. What we are driven by as human beings is not so much accuracy. We are driven by motivations related to what I have dubbed the three Cs. And those are comprehension control and community. So we want to comprehend the world. That is, we just want to understand it, feel like we understand it, even if that understanding is not accurate. We want to have control, that is some sense of agency and power.

Even if we're not truly empowered, we want to feel like we have power. And finally, is community. We want to feel like we are part of a social group, mainly because we survive in groups. And so that is what makes us. us feel whole and safe is knowing that we are part of a community. And so my needs for comprehension, control, and community, I'm going to want to fulfill through the lens of that social identity. I'm going to want to understand the world the way that my team does. I'm going to want to control it in ways that are good for my team. And I'm going to want to enact community in the same way that my team

members do. I mean, more simply put, right, I want to feel like I understand this world, that I matter in this world, that I belong in this world in some ways. That's it. That's it. And those three things are very functional for us as social animals. I mean, obviously, you're a professor and you do the research, but you've written about your own sort of personal experience and why you feel like you really understand this more than just researching and writing about it from your ivory tower. Sure. My first husband was sick with a benign brain tumor that ultimately took his life in 2006. And his illness, it felt like it came out of nowhere. It was months of surgeries, him living in the hospital, me trying to raise our one-year-old baby alone. Oh, it was, my whole world was falling apart, right?

I hadn't finished my dissertation yet. I was in graduate school and I have a baby and my husband's done. Oh, gosh. And it was very clear to me that if I didn't find some kind of pathway forward, I literally would lose my mind. A few months in, I'd say, I started looking online. Where could this have come from? Could this have been from his work? Were there other people at his office that have this?

And then thinking about what about the doctors? Are the doctors doing a good job? Why is he having multiple surgeries? Are they giving him substandard care? All of these negative cognitions, they were a reason to get out of bed because I felt no control over his disease, none at all. What those things offered me, they offered me targets to be angry at, right? Are there people who are doing bad things in the shadows, keeping. those from us and we shouldn't know about them.

That actually is the meta-narrative underlying all conspiracy theory beliefs, that there are people in the shadows who are powerful, who are doing bad things and hiding the truth from us. So I was, whether or not I knew it, down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole. And it offered me different versions of comprehension. Where did the tumor come from? It also offered me a sense of control because, okay, if there are chemicals in the environment, if it's his workplace or our neighborhood, then I could, you know, start an organization and I could tackle that and have someone to be angry at. Turns out they're actually genetic and had probably been there since birth.

What changed my path was this giant group of friends, you know, who established very quickly. that that's not how we are going to make sense of this, Dana. And it's not helping Mike right now. Like you being on the computer, looking up all of these conspiracy theories, is not helping him right now. I'm curious, like, do you remember some of the phrases or words that caught your eye that you think maybe made it more palpable in some ways to go down these rabbit holes? There was, part of it was some of the conspiracy theories were about big pharma, right? Like big pharmaceutical companies might be benefiting somehow from this. There's also the word sheep, like people are being sheep. They're blindly following the leaders. And I think that word sheep is so interesting in the role that it plays, especially on the far right. You know,

know where you have people who pride themselves in valuing freedom, individual rights. So if you value freedom and individual rights, then being called sheep is like an utter violation of those values. And that kind of messaging, once you evoke that emotion, it kind of opens the heart and the mind in a way that reduces your resistance. And you're just ready to rock and roll because you're like, tell me what to do. Tell me what action I need to take. I mean, the problem is also in that we are exploiting this ability to target people because we want them to buy things or we want them to vote a certain way. Is there any hope for us not to be using words that can be laid in and weaponized ever again in this kind of economy?

Well, the fact that the economics of our entire media environment are predicated on this sort of micro-targeting based on identity does not bode well. Okay, I'll just be honest. However, at the individual level, there are things that we can do. So, for example, if in order to be a good member of my side, I avoid certain language and I use other words to prove that I am a good member of my team, perhaps I could change it up as an individual and say, I am going to perhaps acknowledge those places where I am not completely in alignment with my team. And I think that we owe it to democracy to be more honest in our performances of identity. When I see folks online saying, for those of you who are not speaking up on what's going on in Gaza, you know, your silence is deafening. We hear you. And I think, What a shame because you're basically telling people that they have an obligation to put their flag in the sand one way or the other. And especially in a situation as historical and complex as this, is that what you want?

Do you want attitudes and beliefs that are not very well thought out just as expressions of allegiance? Is that what we want? I don't think so. Oh, it's so complicated. There's just no space for that kind of nuance. I feel like as, you know, as people engaging in the public sphere, we need to slow our role a little bit. Allow for that nuance. Allow for the possibility.

You don't see people saying, this is how I view this, but I might be wrong. Once you allow for that possibility, I'll tell you, it's a little bit unsettling because you're sitting in uncertainty, but it's also highly liberating. Because it says, you know what, I don't need to perform in accordance with this. team membership in everything I say and do, I can be open to the possibility I might be wrong and it could change. My view could change and that's okay. That makes sense to me. But I'm also wondering if we need to like walk around with a thesaurus so that we can have these conversations so that we can talk about things without it being coded somehow or or being a dog whistle in some cases.

I mean... I think more important, we do need to give the benefit of the doubt. The notion that people who use the wrong words are somehow enemies, because if you use the wrong word, you're clearly activating a framework of the out group. Well, has that person given you any reason to believe

that they're a bad person or that they're on common? or that they're unjust, giving people the benefit of the doubt is the only way that we're going to survive as a democracy, truly. That was Danigal Young. She's a professor of communications at the University of Delaware. Her book is called Wrong, How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation. You can see her talk at ted.com. So all this hour, we've talked about words sparking a lot of debate today.

But we want to take a few minutes now to dive into the history of a word that we all know and accept, but actually ignited a great deal of controversy about 250 years ago. Mark Forsyth writes about rhetoric and the etymology of the English language. In his talk called What's a Snollie Goster, a short lesson in. political speak, he explains why the founders of the U.S. decided to give its leader the title of president after lots of discussion. Here he is on the TED stage in 2012. To really show you how words and politics interact, I want to take you back to the United States of America just after they'd achieved independence. And they had to face a question of

what to call George Washington. They didn't know. What do you call the leaders? of a Republican country. This was debated in Congress for ages and ages, and there were all sorts of suggestions on the table, which might have made it. Some people wanted him to be called Chief Magistrate Washington, and other people, His Highness, George Washington,

and other people, protector of the liberties of the people of the United States of America, Washington, not that catchy. Some people just wanted to call him king. They thought it was tried and tested, and they weren't even being monarchical there. They had the idea that you could be elected king for a fixed term.

And, you know, could have worked. Everybody got insanely bored, actually, because this debate went on for three weeks, and I read a diary of this poor senator who just keeps coming back on this subject. The reason for the delay in the boredom was that the House of Representatives were against the Senate.

The House of Representatives didn't want Washington to get drunk on power. They didn't want to call him King in case that gave him ideas or his successor ideas. So they wanted to give him the humblest, meagrest, most pathetic title

they could think of. And that title was president. President. They didn't invent the title. I mean, it existed before, but it just meant somebody who presides over a meeting. It was like the foreman of the jury, and it didn't have much more grandeur than the term foreman or overseer. There were occasional presidents of little colonial councils and bits of government, but it was really a nothing title. And that's why the Senate objected to it. They said, that's ridiculous. You can't call him president. this guy has to go and sign treaties and meet foreign dignitaries. And who's going to take him seriously if he's got a silly little title, like President of the United States of America?

And after three weeks of debate, in the end, the Senate did not cave in. Instead, they agreed to use the title president for now. But they also wanted it absolutely set down that they didn't agree with it. from a decent respect for the opinions and practice of civilized nations, whether under Republican or monarchical forms of government, whose custom it is to annex to the office of the chief magistrate

titles of respectability, not bloody president, and that in the intercourse with foreign nations, the majesty of the people of the United States may not be hazarded by an appearance of singularity, i.e. we don't want to look like bloody weirdos. Now you can learn three interesting things from this. First of all, and this is my favourite, is that so far as I've ever been able to find out,

the Senate has never formally endorsed the title of president. Second thing you can learn is that when a government says that this is a temporary measure, you can still be waiting 223 years later. But the third thing you can learn, and this is the really important one, and this is the point I want to leave you on, is that the title,

President of the United States of America, doesn't sound that humble at all these days, does it? The largest economy in the world and a fleet of drones and all that sort of stuff. Reality and history have endowed that title with grandeur. And so the Senate won in the end. They got their title of respectability. And also the Senate's other worry,

the appearance of singularity. Well, it was a singularity back then. And so in the end, the Senate won, and the House of Representatives lost. Because nobody's going to feel that humble when they're told that they are now the president of the United States of America. And that's the important lesson I think you can take away, and the one I want to leave you with. Politicians try to pick words and use words to shape reality and control reality. But in fact, reality changes words. far more than words can ever change reality.

Thank you very much. That was author and dissector of words Mark Forsyth. You can see his full talk at TED.com. Many thanks for listening to our show today on language, words, and politics. This episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner-White, James Delahousie, Harshanahada, and Fiona Girin. It was edited by Sanaas Mashkinpur and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Katie Montilione and Matthew Cloutier. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer.

Our audio engineers were Gilly Moon and James Willits. Our theme music was written by Ramteen Arablewe. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Helen Walters, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Ballerzzo. I'm Manushe Zamorodi, and you've been listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.