If eyes are the window to the soul, as they say, then words are bridges to the mind. They allow us to externalize the inner workings of our affects and beliefs, giving shape to abstract ideas and divulging the biases that help us make meaning of the world. And if that be the case, then perhaps we should spend more time analyzing the words people use in their rhetoric to better understand the connections they make about the world and how they navigate through it.
In a recent interview on the conservative Hugh Hewitt Show, Former President Donald Trump erroneously asserted that thirteen thousand people who had crossed the southern border under the Biden administration were murderers. Trump’s causal theory: genetics. In Trump’s words, “You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
The inflammatory language used by the former president harkens back to the theories of eugenics—a widely discredited pseudoscience that promoted the notion of genetic superiority in a population.
From comments that misattribute Vice President Kamala Harris’ racial identity to his previous description of Haiti and African nation, Trump’s rhetoric connects him to the people who see the world similarly. This is the power of language. It acts as a doorway into culture that helps us identify the people who are like us, which is critical for practitioners and citizens a like.
Culture writer and linguist Amanda Montell speaks about language as the way we get people on the same ideological page and make them feel that they belong to the group. Knowing the hidden meanings within a coded language is to evidence a level of intimacy within a community, a way of proving you’re one of us. The use and understanding of the lexicon signal membership and intimacy and provide a currency that community members can exchange as an act of social cohesion. And the influence of this cohesion informs how we vote, what we buy, and just about every aspect of social living.
Marieke de Mooij, communications scholar and retired professor of international advertising at the University of Navarre, asserts that culture influences our social needs, which, in turn, are satisfied by the use and ownership of innovative products. That is to say, consumption is a byproduct of culture, and language is a signal of cultural subscription because it reveals our ideological schemas. Out of the mouth speaks the abundance of the heart, as the scripture attests. Therefore, to understand language is to understand humanity.
Much like apes physically groom the hairs of other apes to foster community, we use the exchange of language to promote social bonding through the act of mimicry. When conversing with others, we coordinate breaking patterns and use the exact words and similar grammatical structures. These are all means of community building, and the lexicon plays a significant role in this performative act throughout society.
A biblical story recounts a time when the world had one language and one common way of speaking. The people settled on a plot of land and decided to build a tower so high that it reached the heavens to prepare for the possibility of another flood.
According to the story, God saw this as blasphemy, where people would forgo faith for a human-made structure. Regardless of your religious leanings, the story of the Tower of Babel, as it is commonly known, illustrates the role that the lexicon of a community plays in how it enables cooperation among its members.
Language enables cooperation among individuals. So God confused their language, giving them different tongues so that they could not understand each other and, therefore, could not finish the tower.
Considering the nature of language as a cultural practice, I partnered with the consumer insights company Suzy to get a sense of the kind of language that Democrats and Republicans use about hotbed social topics, like guns and the border, to get a sense of how these groups see the world and what unites them.
Using a natural language database to score sentiment on a scale of -1 to 1, we conducted a sentiment survey among Americans across age and gender. The sample was split across self-identified Democrats and Republicans to compare and contrast how these different groups use language to construct meaning in hopes of better understanding “us.” The results said much about the foundational beliefs that serve as antecedents to their voting proclivities.
When probed on guns in America, the Republican respondents provided strong positive statements about the Second Amendment. Language like “right to bear arms” was a reoccurring phrase that gives us some ideological understanding of how they frame the world so that we might better understand their policy preferences. The Republican verbatims also demonstrated negative sentiment on the topic of mental health and neutrality when it comes to background checks and gun violence.
When it comes to the topic of abortion, sentiment also runs strong, with Democrats demonstrating positive language toward personal choices and the right to choose. However, Republican respondents tended to exhibit less positive sentiment in their rhetoric — evoking more neutrality around the topics of birth control, rape and incest.
Surprisingly, the topic of parenting produced positive sentiments for both parties. Democrats tended to have the most positive sentiment around the regulation of social media and the most negative sentiment around the impact on mental health, a point of view they share with Republican respondents. Similarly, both parties shared negative sentiment among with regard to the topic of illegal immigrants and polarizing sentiment around the way the border is covered in the news.
These finding uncovered a powerful truth that is perhaps counterintuitive to reports in the current zeitgeist. The prevailing assumption is that the country is more divided than ever. But if the analysis of our language is any indication, that may not be the case at all. Understanding these kinds of nuances can make the difference in a marketer’s ability to connect with consumers and scale their business, because it centers on understanding people.
Sure, there are plenty of things on which we disagree, as well as factions of the population who hold radical and harmful beliefs. But radicals aside, disagreement isn’t necessarily a bad thing—it leads to more permutations of reality, which helps foster more discourse that leads to better solutions and, perhaps more importantly, better understanding.
However, there is a stipulation. As James Baldwin once said, “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” And this distinction can be identified by the words we choose to outwardly express what’s rooted deeply inside of us—so choose your words wisely.