WHEN LINGUISTICS GET SLOPPY

At its heart, the NLP Communication Model is designed to enable people to be more precise and accurate in the way they hear and use language. The model is all about language— how language works as symbols and representations, how language gets “distorted, deleted, and over- generalized,” and what you can do about it. So, what can you do about it? Detect the kind of distortion, deletion, and/or generalization and ask specific questions to establish more precision and accuracy.

Criminal Heroes. Let’s begin with how the media uses language to turn criminals into “heroes.” What’s been happening in the past few years is that they take someone caught in some criminal behavior who got caught and/or shot and/or killed, and made that person into a “hero.” Now, perhaps if the person who ended up getting shot was basically a good person— someone trying to do good in his community, and then somehow he happened to get shot and killed— that would be a good case for showcasing a person’s life and urging for justice for that injustice. It would still give no validity to people rioting, throwing things at the police, burning down buildings, setting cars on fire, etc.

But that almost never happens. Instead you have a drug addict with a prison record who is now passing counterfeit twenty-dollar bills, resisting arrest, and fighting with police for 17 minutes. Instead you have a person with warrant out for his arrest for carrying a gun, and driving with an expired license, and then resisting arrest. Instead you have a 13-year old boy running around the neighborhood with a gun in hand at 2:30 am. These are not “good” people. These are people committing crimes. George Floyd did not rush into a burning building to save someone, he did not rush into gunfire to save a boy, he did not courageously stand up against injustice for someone else. He was committing a crime.

It’s very sloppy languaging to call a criminal a hero just because he died. The media recently reported that Floyd “sacrificed” himself for police reform. Are you kidding me? He did not sacrifice himself on that alter. He did not offer himself up for anything. He was tragically killed in the process by a combination of things— partly by the policeman’s reckless behavior, partly by the drugs in his body, partly by his bad heart condition.

When the media does this, when it turns criminals into heroes and celebrities and then turns on the police and makes them totally and exclusively the problem, we have language misuse at the level of what George Orwell anticipated in 1984.

Systemic racism. Here’s more sloppy languaging. Biden used it as an indictment against America. But how could racism by systemic— throughout the whole system— when America voted twice for a black president (Obama) and again for a black vice-president (Harris)? Harris, standing behind Biden when he made that indictment, is a living symbol that America does not

suffer from “system racism.” How could America have that problem when it has elected black men and women to Congress, to the Senate, to the Supreme court, to every level of courts, to Governors, etc.? All of that shouts against Biden’s indictment and makes his statement completely unfounded in fact.

My friend Kenneth Attwell, UK, sent me the following video. It is between John McWhorter, Professor of Linguistics and Glenn Lourey about how they, as African Americans, are experiencing the current media debates. Very insightful.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X0H4M5uP_y8