23rd April 2011 What's in a word?

How easy it is to change our attitude by changing a single word, causing us to no longer look at the person but to dehumanise them. We ease our consciences by devaluing a person so actions against them don't seem so bad. For example, from  an article by  Steve Cuno: How a single word change can make cruelty seem OK:

In a breathtaking high-speed car chase, he barely evaded the hoodlums bent on beating the daylights out of his friend and him.

Fairly certain that the average car chase does not spontaneously generate, I asked if he and his friend might have done anything to provoke his would-be attackers.

“Yeah,” he said. “We threw beer on a couple of women.”

What may trouble you, as it did me, is that everyone hearing this tale of reckless youth erupted in laughter. No one asked what on earth had moved him to cruelly assault two human beings he didn’t even know. Everyone took it as no more than an innocent prank.

 Time for me to come clean. I didn’t quite quote him accurately. He didn’t say “women.” He said “hookers.”

When I share this anecdote, a not-unusual reaction is: Hookers? Oh, that’s different. Somehow, changing “women” to “hookers” makes the assault appear less serious — perhaps even understandable — by making the victims seem less-than-human.

We need to keep check on this dehumanising of individuals or groups, whether through colour, religion, sexuality, intelligence or whatever, since it leads to cruelty against them being seen as more 'acceptable'.

The rest of the article is well worth a read.