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Don’t Use Passive Language To Describe Active Injustice
Words matter: the ones we choose and those we don’t when seeking to convey information, especially about social and political issues.
They can transmit thoughts clearly, or, chosen haphazardly, can muddy the waters of communication, confusing the listener or reader in ways that undermine the purpose of speaking or writing them in the first place.
If we pick words that are overwrought or exaggerations for the thing we’re describing — like analogizing virtually everything we don’t like to Nazism or enslavement — we run the risk of losing all credibility, and deservedly so.
As in, “Asking me to wear a mask in your business is how it starts — soon you’ll be making me wear a yellow star and sending me to an extermination camp.”
Or, “Oh, you’re telling me I have to get a vaccine? What’s next? Are you going to make me pick cotton?”
Or, “Oh, you eat meat? So, you’re like a serial killer then — good to know.”
If we deploy words that are too understated, however, we run the opposite risk of minimizing real problems in a way that dangerously downplays the awfulness in need of being addressed.
