Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Language and Deception

Dr. Tom Wasow
August 31, 2008
Palo Alto, CA

Language is a medium of communication, but miscommunication is rampant. Much miscommunication is intentional — that is, people use language to deceive one another. What are the properties of language that lead to miscommunication? I’m going to argue for three, though there may well be others.

• Language is full of vagueness and ambiguity.
• Language use involves lots of (usually unconscious) metaphor.
• Language users are sensitive to frequencies of usage.

After explaining what I mean by each of these and giving some examples, I will speculate on why language has these properties.

Vagueness and ambiguity are two slightly different ways in which the meanings of expressions can be unclear. A vague expression has an imprecise meaning, that may shift from context to context. A simple example is red: red’s boundaries with orange, pink, purple, and brown are not precisely defined, and they may depend on what the term is being applied to. So red hair is a brownish-orange color; the colors of red wine or red cabbage might be described as purple if they were on something else, and when skin is described as red, it is generally a color that could just as easily be called pink.

A more interesting example is the word freedom. This is a much-used (and abused) word of late. FDR talked about freedom from want and from fear (as well as freedom of speech and religion); but we don’t hear much about freedom from anything anymore. Rather, the term freedom seems to be identified mostly with market economics these days. But its denotation is really so vague as to be essentially vacuous. As Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster put it in the song “Me and Bobby McGee”, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

An ambiguous expression is one with multiple distinct meanings (which may or may not be vague). We linguists love ambiguity, and discuss it at length in our books and papers. A favorite example is The chicken is ready to eat, which can mean that the chicken is ready to be fed, or that it is ready to be eaten. Another is a sign I saw in the London Underground: Dogs must be carried. This is an ambiguity only a linguist would notice, because the intended interpretation is so much more plausible than the other one: if you have a dog with you, you must carry it. But it has another possible interpretation, namely, that only people carrying dogs are allowed there. (Notice that there is a subtle intonational difference between the two: the sensible interpretation has the main stress on carried, whereas the silly interpretation has main stress on dogs).

My favorite example of an ambiguity is the common expression lifetime guarantee. What is ambiguous here is whose lifetime is intended. Consumers generally believe it means their own lifetimes, but companies that offer lifetime guarantees often put in the fine print that it means the lifetime of the product. In other words, the product is guaranteed until it breaks! (Some states have enacted laws requiring lifetime guarantees to be good for the normal expected life of the product).

The second feature of language that I claim supports miscommunication is the extensive use of metaphor. The hidden metaphors in our everyday language is something that has been discussed in great detail by the Berkeley linguist, George Lakoff. I will have much less to say about it.

Metaphors are analogies: two domains are alike in some respect, and something from the first domain is described using language from the second — e.g., talking about time using language from space (consider a point in time, a long time, moving an event forward or back in time, etc.). Metaphors lead to miscommunication because listeners may impute the wrong properties of the first domain to the second domain.

A common example in politics is to liken situations to war: war on poverty, war on drugs, war on terror. Literally, war is a condition of armed conflict between nations. The rules of civilized behavior are suspended in war, so calling something a war encourages people to think that it’s okay for government to assume extreme powers — such as imprisonment without charges, wiretaps without court orders, or torture, in the case of the war on terror.

A linguistically interesting example of the war metaphor is culture wars: this is unusual because war is pluralized. Presumably, this is because the term is used to link so many intrinsically unconnected things, e.g., gay rights, prayer in school, teaching evolution, affirmative action, gun control, etc.

Another interesting case of a war metaphor is class warfare. Whenever politicians talk about addressing the growing inequality in this country, they are accused of promoting class warfare. What is unusual is that this is perceived as negative. This contrasts with all the other war metaphors, which have the positive connotation of a battle against evil. Why is this one different? I think it’s because of the historical association of the expression with Marxism.

And this brings me to the third property of language that leads to miscommunication, namely, the effect of frequency of usage. Expressions that appear together often enough can change their meanings simply through the repeated association. People are very sensitive to the frequency of co-occurrence of words, and this influences their interpretations. Let me give you some examples.

The terms regime and administration both refer to the group of people ruling a country; but regime is used only for governments that are deemed bad in conventional wisdom, whereas administration is used for good or neutral governments. No US newspaper would ever talk about the regime in Washington or the administration in Beijing.

An example that Republicans have used brilliantly in the past 40 years is the associations they have managed to give to the terms elite and elitist. How did Barack Obama, the child of a single mother who was once on food stamps come to be considered elite, whereas George W. Bush, the grandson of a senator, the son of a president, and a product of Andover, Yale, and Harvard, avoid the label? One possible answer appeared on the blog Alternet¹: “what the elitist label has truly come to signify [is] education and intellect. McCain and Bush may be of the upper crust, but it’s clear to all who observe them that they’re not very bright. Obama, on the other hand, clearly was paying attention at Harvard. That’s why the label sticks to him.” Geoffrey Nunberg, who has discussed the current usage of elite and elitist at some length² notes that the term media elite occurs three times as often as business elite in US newspapers, but the ratio is reversed in the UK. Likewise, liberal elite occurs three times as often conservative elite, although people who are truly elite by virtue of their money and power tend to be more conservative than those who are not.

Another example of miscommunication through frequent co-occurrence is McCain’s label as a maverick. He has voted with the Bush administration (or should I say regime?) 90% of the time, but the constant repetition of the word with his name has made people believe that he is different from other conservative Republicans.

My final example of this phenomenon is waterboarding. This form of torture has been around for centuries, but this term for it was not introduced until 2004. The term conjures up associations of recreational activities (skateboarding, surfing, waterskiing, etc.) and this has made it possible to question its immorality and even its status as torture.

Why would language have these properties that seem to undermine its communicative function? Two answers (not mutually exclusive) have been suggested in the linguistics literature.

The first is that speech is a very low-bandwidth medium of information transmission. Our minds can process information much faster than our mouths and ears can transmit and receive it. So if the information is incomplete (vague, ambiguous, depending on metaphors), we can rely on our listeners’ very considerable powers of reasoning to infer our intended meanings. So accuracy is sacrificed for efficiency. Interestingly, there are certain specialized uses of language, such as legal documents or scientific discourse, in which precision is especially important. And these fields have developed their own linguistic registers, which to outsiders seem longwinded and cumbersome.

Another possible explanation for the fact that language has properties that facilitate miscommunication is evolutionary. It seems plausible the ability to deceive had some evolutionary advantage, so that people evolved to speak languages that facilitated deception.

With that depressing thought in mind, let me wrap up. I have been using mostly political examples, because we are in the midst of a presidential election year, so that is what I have been reading and thinking about. As the campaign goes forward and we are bombarded with messages from candidates, we would do well to recall George Orwell’s words from his famous essay, “Politics and the English Language”³:

Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

 

Reflection: Problems in Translation by Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern

 

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