Label Laundering & Label Poisoning

I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn’t poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me underpriviledged was overused, I was disadvantaged. I still don’t have a dime, but I have a great vocabulary.

Jules Feiffer ¹

Communication is the most important faculty that we as human beings have access to. The ability to clearly and precisely communicate is the lynchpin in most of human civilization and advancement. Likewise the ability to communicate sloppily, and still get a point across is just as important. In many cases we don’t need as precise of words because what we are trying to get across is (at least seemingly) incredibly simple. Unfortunately this imprecision can have it’s consequences. There are two main consequences I want to talk about:

People choosing severe words to relegate a words meaning to an emotion with emphasis (Label Laundering)
The attempt to ban a word in order to protest the underlying intent of it being used (label poisoning)

Label Laundering

As time has gone on more and more people are engaging with topics they likely never would have if it wasn’t for the internet. With this change, many topics that have a vast amount of nuance are becoming more mainstream. There is therefore a draw for media providers to speak about them. Additionally these media providers need to stay “relevant” via clicks and watch time. One consequence of this is that many people need the most extreme notion of a topic in order for it to be worth talking about. Likewise the nuance also makes it hard to have “an answer”, which most people do not like. So at this point we have a mismatch in incentives. To explain a topic properly requires nuance, and a somewhat grey-zone as opposed to “an answer”, but a public who wants “an answer” quickly, and a media landscape that lives and dies by viewership.

All of these are a perfect storm for the phenomenon I’m describing. Not only do you need an answer, but once you give an answer you need a reason for people to come back. Geopolitics, medicine, scientific advancement, for all of them there needs to be simple holistic ideologies that can be bought into. Once people are bought into they need a reason to keep coming back, which requires a ratcheting up of beliefs to keep the content “spicy & interesting”. Videos online expressing crazy views are no longer just an isolated phenomenon, they are indicative of “a woke communist agenda”, or “fascist rhetoric”. “They” are against you, and “they” are an ever expanding list of people and groups. The problem with this “label laundering” is twofold:

You are simplifying complex situations down into too low-resolution representations
Essentially using a word to launder in severity to situations that don’t demand it

The first concern is somewhat self explanatory, however the primary concern with this second issue is that the constant need for severe terms is a matter of the boy who cried wolf. Whenever I read a news headline now that talks about fascism², or communism³, or even genocide⁴ ⁵, I have no idea if they “really mean it” or not. Some groups have taken to using additional adjectives to their words to delineate (cultural genocide, fasc-y etc.) between the actual words, but why is this even necessary?

Severity breeds necessity

In this arms race of severity we have brought it to the point now where no one will take things seriously if they aren’t “severe enough”. Let’s take something like healthcare in the US. If I were to talk about it honestly, then I might say something like “health policy is complicated, however people need prescription drugs to survive and so there must be a solution to cover people who have life-long illnesses at least”. This would be a relatively level response while considering the concerns of people in public policy, health policy, and people affected by these decisions, and no one would ever give a shit.

Instead if I ran with something like “Pharmacare executives are complicit in a genocide of the poor and needy. If someone cannot pay, and are therefore not exploitable, then they’ve earned their death. Executives are happy to watch them writhe and be slaughtered in the streets so long as they can continue to watch their bottom line go up”. This feels way more exciting. Not only is the wording more harsh, but the stakes feel more grandiose. Deciding to help is no longer a matter of “doing something good for people struggling”, now it’s “fighting valiantly against people committing genocide”, now who wouldn’t find that cool!

The problem is that this only works if you are wholly uninterested in solutions. Pharmaceutical companies, and other groups will just seek to bury you, and law makers will avoid you because severe rhetoric doesn’t play well with most voting populations ⁶. However this failure can in and of itself be a positive. This change in rhetoric is completely tied to the emotional outcomes of the argument. These words become proxies for “I disagree with x”, and make them feel childish. It helps feed the same positive feedback loop that helps to feed people who are looking for more attention. The honest truth is that most situations are not as fantastical as they seem, and using words this way just lowers the overall precision to a point they’re meaningless.

Label Poisoning

Label poisoning seeks to do the opposite of Label Laundering. Label laundering intends to have words be used more frequently, label poisoning however seeks to ban words. Label poisoning tends to take a particular path through the lifecycle of a words usage:

A word becomes used in association with something negative
The word gains more and more popularity until it is primarily associated with the negativity
A new word is “decided” to replace the existing word
The “old word” becomes taboo

As an example we can use the word retarded. Retard (from retardé) in general means to slow or delay something. Retarders for example are systems in large machinery that help slow something down (often semi-trucks will use them). Eventually this concept was applied to people, and anyone with a cognitive delay was called retarded⁷. Naturally then in association with this people began using retarded pejoratively. In the mid 2000’s to modern day (as of writing) retarded is considered a socially taboo word to use, in fact a law was passed in 2010 to change it’s usage in US documents⁸. So, that means now that the pejorative comparison of people to those who are cognitively delayed is gone, right?

Retarded is just the latest in a long line of terms that had this treatment (idiot, moron, etc.). In fact idiot and moron have actually been out of circulation as major pejoratives for long enough that in most of North America people don’t bat an eye at using them. It seems as if there becomes a “social heat” associated with the word when it’s usage is associated with more nefarious intents, which slowly decays over time. In this case retarded is simply a label that has been poisoned. In many places it is no longer permissible to use, in fact I’m sure people will have problems with how often it appeared in this article.

Intentional Harm

There are many issues with label poisoning, but the main one is that the struggle it is often trying to solve is inherently unsolvable. The assumption made by people is that banning these words will remove their harm, but this is not true. People simply move on to other euphemisms and change the label they use. The problem is that people want to cause harm to others with their words. I would argue this actually isn’t a problem inherently, but it causes an issue for label poisoning as a concept. In order to want to remove labels there is a secret premise you must agree with, this word is harmful and therefore should be removed. But what if you want to cause harm to someone?

Insults have been part of languages for as long as we’ve had languages. The reality is that people don’t owe one another to “get along”, and so people will seek to harm one another with their words. At best you’ve created a smokescreen where the people who are trying to be harmful are just slightly more covert. Instead if you want to make a real change then you should challenge the negative association. Idiot, moron, retarded etc. any of these words point a negative association directly to cognitive function, but specifically in reference to people who are immutably cognitively delayed. Someone who has one of the disorders that would have traditionally got this label are associated with being lesser. This association is the heart of the real issue. If you want to wipe out using this sort of rhetoric that association is what you want to attack. From there as a society we need to decide if it is cruel beyond reasonability, and remedy it.

Disambiguation

Most of what’s been talked about so far is relatively an emotional response. The reason these happen is to avoid certain emotions. While I would argue pejoratives aren’t the problem, I can still understand people not wanting them around. There are however another class of label poisionings that propose a ubiquitous issue. Canada has recently begun looking to remove letter grades ⁹. The goal of this renaming is to make it hard to disambiguate. For students who are struggling, and who are doing well, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where these lines are. Instead of A,B,C,D,F as a straight hierarchy, there is “now emerging”, “developing”, “proficient” and “extending”. At this point we have 2 options, either the values correspond exactly the same, and in which case emerging is simply D to F, or it means something different completely.

With this change the claim is to shift away from comparison to instead focusing on understanding content. There is an obvious issue with this if it were actually true. Eventually academics does become a competition, and generally scarcity is still present in higher academia. The choice to make a comparison is not actually up to the board that is doing this. Eventually students will be compared by their performance, and this system only seeks to make that more complicated. Ironically this will likely lead to a more granular form of disambiguation where instead of just letters students will likely have to provide direct percentages to apply to other institutions. Universities will not accept a vague range of performance. Which they clearly understand because this change only effects K-9, so on top of shifting into a new paradigm of high school it’s also now when competition begins? Does this not just cement that K-9 is “basically daycare”, and “real” school begins afterwards? If that’s the case, then fair enough, but keep in mind that some high schools also have conditional acceptance, so anyone who comes from this paradigm is now at a disadvantage inherently.

We can’t run away from uncomfortable truths. People are compared to others and there are people that will lose those comparisons. There should not be a cowering from this fact. Instead there should be an attempt to strengthen people’s resolves to accept when they fail and work to succeed either elsewhere, or to try again in whatever they failed at. We should not lower the bar to entrance at schools, we should instead facilitate learning environments that elevate people at the margins. All we do by running from these sorts of uncomfortable topics is kneecap people from being able to succeed, and to be resilient to adversity.

Internal Struggle

One somewhat side point I want to mention as well is the issue of even having the authority to suggest these changes. There have been tons of movements that exist for people who are part of a group wanting to identify as a “problematic” term. Anecdotally I’ve heard this for dwarf and blind, likewise I’ve heard this for people who are first nations who prefer Indian. In these cases it feels weird to intervene to tell someone they can’t identify with their own identity their way. But also as an outsider to these groups I also shouldn’t be expected to take a social hit for a preference. Just because someone wants to be called a dwarf or Indian doesn’t mean I should suffer the social consequences of doing so for their comfort, or should I?

This question is one that does bother me. Outside of the other arguments in this article I genuinely don’t know where to take this. Personally I just stick with the “safe” wording, and explain that it’s not worth it for me to deal with in a public setting, but this does feel awful to do. This also “throws the baby out with the bathwater” on the trans identification arguments as well. If one were to say that it’s the case you must respect people’s wishes and call them by “problematic” terms if they ask you, then you are saying that persons arbitrary right to identification is more important than one’s own social self-preservation. On the other hand if you say that you can refuse on this basis then someone can also refuse to call people their preferred pronouns inherently. The only way around this is to say that someone asking you to call them something “problematic” is doing it disingenuously, but now you run into the same problem with the trans side and people who don’t believe in their identity. I see no sufficient way out of this problem.

But the stigma

With this one last argument that is important to address is that many people often try to have these words changed for “acceptance” or “fighting hate”. The problem with this claim is that you aren’t actually doing any of that with changing the words. As we saw with the history of medically-related pejoratives the reality is people just change language. People will find new words and/or euphemisms, new dogwhistles and whatever they need to get the same point across. People still harbor the same animosity, or indifference it’s just now it’s more difficult to determine who’s who. If someone is homophobic or racist, they will still be after the word is banned. If someone wants to call someone an idiot, they will do it with whatever words or euphemisms necessary. If you really care about these things you need to target the attitudes and convince people away from them instead of trying to get “quick wins”.

These quick wins have consequences and the people who are doing so not out of malice are swept up in the changes along with those who are. This just helps breed general resentment for “the thought police” and those who want to administer language to people who are trying to communicate.

Conclusion

Communication is essential, and with the internet the landscape of communication is changing. We also need to adapt to these changes, but we need to make sure these changes are done appropriately, and address the actual concerns we care about. Otherwise we cede too much ground to allow resentment and indifference to situations where language should be changed down the road.