This was published over at the Science-Based Medicine blog a few months ago and caught my attention thanks to today’s blog post over there. It’s a droll account of how the nonsense that is ‘Complementary and Alternative Medicine’ managed to sell itself not just to the public but to the medical establishment to the point that it gets written about in medical journals and taken seriously by people who should know better.

What is particularly interesting to me in this is the use of language to effect this coup. Change language and you change perception indeed.

Well, Jeff, quackery is a pejorative term. Some time ago we recognized that words raise emotions and mental pictures. We recognized the cognitive dissonance raised by them, so we tried to eliminate quackery. We recognized the cognitive dissonance raised when one discusses acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy, and healing at a distance as if they were quackery when we made claims. For a century, most people just could not allow for the possibility that these things really work.

So over time we recognized that we had to do something about our language. That would be the first step in enabling the thought revolution that is upon us, and changing the paradigm in medicine and science. We simply changed the adjectives, and gave alternate names to the methods, added a few phrases to eliminate negative reactions, and shifted the negative terms to descriptions of the Medical Establishment (and, note the caps in that one.)

And along with that, we took advantage of a shift in perception, to be sure that the public would adopt a non-judgmental attitude. Of course, we had to wait decades for that attitude to mature to the point that they would be willing to give our claims a hearing, whereas just thirty years ago they would have dismissed the claims out of hand.Not only did we get that non-judgmental mind-set, but with it, a strong negative reaction to a description that contained an opinion or one that used any kind of loaded language to describe an underdog – no matter how true or justified that language happened to be. Fortunately for us, a wave of change spread across the intelligentsia, especially in the universities and the literary community, reinforced by the press.

Thoughts inevitably turn to Orwell, but also to Deborah Tannen, Francis Wheen, Barbara Ehrenreich and many others who’ve been trying, each with the tools at their disposal, to point out that what we’re doing is tantamount to, as my brother put it, ‘shooting ourselves in the foot while being chased by a steamroller.’

What the World Eats, Part I is a photo essay documenting what 15 different families around the world eat during an average week. It’s from the book Hungry Planet, which features many more families and apparently deals in some detail with their lives and their relationship with food. It doesn’t sound like it’ll be all that interesting, until you start looking at the pictures. Even with very little text accompanying them, they speak volumes.

I read about this quiz on Language Hat and went promptly attempted it to see how many of the 100 most common words in the English language I could guess in 5 minutes. I got 54 and just about all of the ones I didn’t get were so obvious, but only when I had them highlighted in red in front of me. Ah well. Give it a try and see how many you get.

This one’s for Zebunnisa.
Cat Power