Words matter. As artist-poet-scientists, we need to consider the power of words and how we use them. Doing so is a powerful way to examine our personal universe by identifying subtle frames and hidden meanings that are affecting our understanding.
It’s not about being politically correct but communicating clearly.
In writing my book proposal, I was asked to describe what I intended to accomplish with it. In my first draft, I wrote “to recruit readers into the community of creators actively working to improve the world.”
My use of the verb “to recruit” bothered me almost immediately.
It took me a while before I understood why: it evokes a military frame with meanings I didn’t intend to associate with the community of creators: a rigid power hierarchy, the need to follow orders, and so on. In many ways, the creator community I’m writing about is the opposite of a military organization:
- It’s a distributed structure where the military is a rigid hierarchy.
- Power and decisions propagate from all around the community instead of the top-down power structure of the military.
- The primary mission of the community is to increase life where the military exists to pose a credible threat to life, a threat that is often realized.
- Creators are looking for cooperation on a global scale, and while there’s a great deal of cooperation within the military, at a global scale, a military is the ultimate competitive tool.
If I used the word recruit in my writing, I risked evoking all of this in the mind of my reader and confusing them. Their subconscious would be trying to reconcile this community of creators with the military frame I evoked. At the very least, they would likely misunderstand what I was trying to say.
I considered using “to invite” instead, but that comes with its own frame. It implies that I’m in a position to grant you access to the community, as though it were somehow my party and you could only attend by my invitation. But we all have the right to join, invited or not.
I finally decided that my roll wasn’t to convince my readers to join the community. I would simply inform them of the community’s existence and that they were free to join it if they chose to.
Maybe all of this sounds like splitting hairs, but it’s the kind of nuance that we need if we’re going to become better humans.
