Steven Pinker: observation

Transcript context

…I was influenced by some essays you’ve written about the limits of language to advance political change. You’ve written about the euphemism treadmill and stuff like that. There seems to be modern versions of that, where to abolish gender binaries, we’re going to abandon pronouns and so forth. You work on a university so you’re probably familiar with a lot of this. I’d like your opinion on some of these strategies for advancing social change through abandoning certain languages and certain words and forms of language. Politically motivated campaigns to change language can have an effect, as we see in what I call the euphemism treadmill — that is, the fact that we don’t use the word negro anymore, even though it was a perfectly respectful and unexceptionable term through the 1970s. Martin Luther King frequently referred to Negroes. You had the United Negro College Fund. That got replaced by black, which then got replaced by African American. But it’s easier to do it with what linguists call open-class vocabulary items, nouns and verbs, than with closed-class or grammatical items like pronouns. Since the ’70s, there have been a number of proposals to introduce a gender‑neutral pronoun into the English language, so that we wouldn’t have to say he or she, or the clumsy he or she. None of them have caught on. Language doesn’t change in terms of its — it does change, but not quickly, and usually not by deliberate engineering when it comes to things like articles, pronouns, past tense and plural markers, and so on. There’ll be just a natural resistance. They’re learned early. They are highly frequent. They are distributed across millions of people conversing with one another. I don’t think we have to worry about that changing too, too quickly. But, sure, there are more respectful and less respectful ways of referring to people. We’ve seen those change, and they’ll probably continue to change. What I call the euphemism treadmill refers to the fact that the reason there often is a cycling is that the change in attitudes that you want to affect by changing the language will meet resistance in terms of the rest of our psychology. I don’t think it’s true that language determines your attitudes and beliefs, although it can push against them. As long as there’s still some kind of negative connotation to an entity, then changing the label for it will just result in the new label picking up the emotional aura of the concept rather than the other way around. As long as there is prejudice against African Americans where the connotation is not as positive as you’d like it to be, there will be the urge to find a new label that has not yet absorbed the taint of the existing one. African American I think took over pretty quickly sometime in the 1990s. I think Jesse Jackson was the force behind it. We have gone now for more than 20-something years without a replacement of that, which might be a reflection of the fact that prejudice against African Americans is declining. In other cases like Asian replacing Oriental, that stayed put, possibly because there was less prejudice against Asian people and there wasn’t a need to find a fresh replacement for that. If I could just interject on this, given this campaign season and also what you can, say, see on Twitter if you look for it, do you think public speech is now evolving to become less polite? In America?…

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