The words we use

Good. Bad. These are two words that have come back into pub­lic lan­guage re­cently. Un­for­tu­nately, they are words that ex­press the ex­tremes of a moral spec­trum and have been re­turned to pol­i­tics via the snarling mouth of US liar-in-chief, Don­ald Trump.

I have tended to think that using a word like 'good' is a clear one and there­fore bet­ter than say­ing some­thing is 'ap­pro­pri­ate'. We can eas­ily dis­cuss why X, Y or Z is good or bad (and just as im­por­tantly, who some­thing is good or bad for) but it is much more dif­fi­cult to say why some­thing is ap­pro­pri­ate. That is why it has been a pop­u­lar word with pre-Trump politi­cians look­ing for a sneaky way to jus­tify the un­jus­ti­fi­able.

I re­mem­ber first hear­ing the word ap­pro­pri­ate when I started out as a sec­ondary school teacher in the mid-1990s. Stu­dents would often be told that their be­hav­iour was in­ap­pro­pri­ate and I could see that this word had no mean­ing for them, apart from being pro­hib­i­tive. It would have been a lot more ed­u­ca­tional to tell them that they had done some­thing that was dis­re­spect­ful, dan­ger­ous, il­log­i­cal or even thought­less.

Of course it could be ar­gued that all this con­cern with words is just for writ­ers and teach­ers, and is some kind of an aca­d­e­mic ex­er­cise that has no rel­e­vance for the av­er­age per­son. After all, they are only words, right? I would sim­ply reply: tell that to the Roma rights groups. Only a cou­ple of years ago they felt com­pelled to protest against a de­ci­sion by Spain's Royal Lan­guage Acad­emy (RAE) to in­clude a de­f­i­n­i­tion of a gypsy as a 'swindler' in their new of­fi­cial dic­tio­nary. Words in­form and they can also mis­in­form. Trump and May and Le Pen and Wilders know this all too well.

Oth­ers have noted the im­por­tance of lan­guage across so­ci­ety. Writ­ing in the Span­ish news­pa­per El Pais, Josep Ra­moneda ar­gued that “the strug­gle for power, any­where, is also the strug­gle for the con­trol of words. The one who im­poses his ver­bal cat­e­gories on the pub­lic mind wins. Ex­am­ple: the word aus­ter­ity.” His opin­ion is that “peo­ple are ac­cept­ing it as some­thing in­evitable. Aus­ter­ity is one of the terms of virtue. From it de­rives a whole chain of com­ple­men­tary words: sac­ri­fice, rigor, re­spon­si­bil­ity, etc.”

Ig­nor­ing all the shades of grey in his black and white uni­verse, Don­ald Trump tells any­one who will lis­ten what is bad and what is good, but he al­most never uses the word ‘be­cause' to ex­plain why things can be cat­e­gorised so neatly into these two cat­e­gories. He as­serts. He in­sists. If he and the oth­ers like him are to be coun­tered, it will be down to the rest of us to do the ex­plain­ing. Through clear im­agery and equally sim­ple words.