The power of words

The word bonus plagued the bank bosses

A POINT OF VIEW

Subtle nuances in terminology can shift our view of any given debate, says Katharine Whitehorn.

It's not surprising that everyone loathes bankers at the moment, but I wonder if what's put the final edge on our fury is not the one word "bonus".

They think - apparently still think - they deserve an extra payment for doing well, when they've obviously done so extremely badly.

I know the arguments for the defence - that fixed salaries demand a flexible element, to reflect how well or badly the bank has done, and the - to me - spurious one that without colossal incentives you don't get the best men.

Words shape the way we think about things Hear Radio 4's A Point of View

Most of them have "guaranteed bonuses" built into their contracts - though if that's not an oxymoron I don't know what is. But it's the sanctimoniousness that gets us, them still patting themselves on the back. It's much the same way that what you really hate about having to leap out of the way of bicycles on the pavement is that they still feel so moral because they're not in cars.

Instead of bonuses, some people in New York are now talking about "maluses", and so should we.

Can a word really have so much importance? The row about Carol Thatcher and the golliwog has more or less died down, but no-one would deny what a flashpoint a racist word can be.

Years ago there was an alleged scandal at Gatwick because the holding quarters for immigrants were said to have golliwog toys. Being on the board of the British Airports Authority at the time (in the days when it was mainly concerned with flying aeroplanes, not running shopping malls), I thought I'd better investigate.

When I saw these toys, it turned out that some of the baby dolls given to the small scared African toddlers were, thoughtfully, simply black baby dolls. It was a false alarm but the word golliwog was enough to appall us all.

Political correctness

But does it really matter that much what words we use? I think it does, because the words shape the way we think about things.

As Christopher Fry wrote in The Dark is Light Enough "I was Richard's wife and though it was only a word, yet still a word stays in the mind and has its children too"

The words we use ought to match what we actually do - yet in spite of all the political correctness people grumble about, in some ways language hasn't quite kept up with social changes.

A single word put Carol Thatcher at the centre of a media storm

We have same-sex marriage, but how do you refer to the couple? We've been making do with "partner" for decades, but it means too many things, not just unmarried couples, but so much else - I have struggled often through a sentence about a GP, a lesbian daughter of a friend of mine and her partner, a woman, and her partner as a GP, who is male, and his partner, who is another bloke.

One gay man I know refers to his CP - the man with whom he has a civil partnership - but surely there should be a stronger word.

So why not wife and wife? Or husband and husband? I'm on tricky ground here, but I don't think these work well, because both words are packed with so much history - baggage if you like.

"Wife" has echoes of the helpmeet, sure, but also the one whose rights had to be fought for, whose marriage too often involved a property exchange arranged by her family, or an obligation about continuing the line, bearing sons - "an heir and a spare" - which can be quite irrelevant to a same-sex union.

Diana Athill, in her recent book Somewhere Towards the End, remarked wryly that though she had through all her innumerable sexual encounters utterly rejected the tiresome role of wife, she was now landed with it in old age, since her last partner is old and wambly and needs looking after.

Unisex language

"Husband," too, implies all sorts of things besides love and cohabitation - the breadwinner and protector maybe, head of a household, chap with rights and responsibilities about women and children.

Cleopatra implied something stronger than love alone when, dying, she said: "Husband, I come".

When you come to dancing, real equality would mean referring to all the males as ballerinas

Not all well-meaning attempts to make language unisex work too well, either. I don't much like the habit of referring to women in print just by their surnames - the Times obituary of Dame Joyce Bishop, a pioneering headmistress, some years ago referred to her throughout as "Bishop" when all the world knew her as Dame Joyce.

Women don't necessarily get as attached to their surnames, which are apt to change, as to the first names they're usually called by. We feel that using a feminine version of something tends to demean it in English - it doesn't of course, languages, such as French or Italian, in which every word has a gender.

There it's OK for an academic to be called dotoressa, we'd hardly say doctoress. And I disliked it a lot when a crusty old beast on the Observer used to refer to the weekly columns I wrote there as sermonettes.

But sometimes unsexing the word for an occupation - calling women actors, for example - seems to imply that the male "actor" is somehow more the real thing than the female "actress". When you come to dancing, real equality would mean referring to all the males as ballerinas.

Double meaning

I don't, myself, share the indignation of many older people about using "gay" for homosexual when it used just to mean light-hearted and fun.

There are stacks of words that mean two things. Light that you see by, light not heavy, cricket match or matches you light fires with, socks that do or don't match and the double meaning even has its uses. When the science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke was asked if he was gay, he would answer: "I am mildly cheerful."

Words can matter in darker ways - I'm thinking of the incalculable harm done by euphemisms

And of course there's the way words mean different things in American or Australian English. I knew through the International Women's Forum a woman from Minnesota who was tall and imposing, but had bad feet and always wore trainers, even to a British Embassy party we were invited to in Washington.

I teased her once about wearing her trainers even to that party. a year or two later she joked: "And you said I wore nappies to the British Embassy." It turned out that "trainers" in American English were training pants for toddlers - which she'd translated back into English English as nappies.

All this is fun, but words can matter in darker ways. I'm thinking of the incalculable harm done by euphemisms.

Take, for example, the phrase "honour killings" - which is the polite way of describing what happens when a family kills a daughter or a sister for daring to choose her own mate - or even, in some countries, for being raped, as she's now defiled.

I'm not for censorship and I'm not an editor, but if I was, I'd insist that the only words to be used for such brutality should be family murder.

Insidious processes

And if anyone thinks I'm being politically incorrect to single out what is sometimes thought of as a largely Asian practice, what about the euphemism of the American "extraordinary rendition" which means taking those they disapprove of to countries where they can torture them?

"Waterboarding" - another little habit of our allies - is described in a paper last week as "not as much fun as it sounds".

There's a book called "standard operational procedure" which describes the insidious processes by which, from the vice president down to the humblest GI, such practices became accepted. Without these cheating words might not a bit more reluctance have been shown?

Words matter. We live by them, all of us, even those of us who seem to have a vocabulary of about 20, five of them not mentionable in polite company.

Noam Chomsky thought it was the mark of a human being, that only we, among all living creatures, have such an inbuilt facility.

But that has recently been proved wrong by experiments with highly intelligent chimpanzees who could, by signing, use words, and perfectly distinguish them.

The chimpanzee who was best at it they called, to my delight, Noam Chimpsky. But maybe even we, in our use of words, have a bit more evolving to do.