Poets, Priests, and Politicians

Steve Portigal Portigal Consulting | steve@portigal.com

OPINION TRUE TALES

Poets, priests, and politicians Have words to thank for their positions

Words that scream for your submission

And no one’s jamming their transmission

…

De do do do, de da da da

Is all I want to say to you

De do do do, de da da da

They’re meaningless and all that’s true

—Sting, “De Do Do Do, De Da

Da Da,“ Zenyatta Mondatta, 1980

 

In “The Persuaders,” a 2004 episode of PBS’s “Frontline,” Douglas Rushkoff profiled Frank Luntz, a consultant who helps political and corporate clients identify the words that generate support for a client’s goals. Luntz (and his clients in the Republican party) reframed “estate tax” as “death tax” and “global warming” as “ climate change.” Of course, we’re increasingly exposed to rhetoric in the arenas of marketing and politics. It’s easy to be cynical and dismissive of relabeling. “It’s a feature, not a bug,” has long been a cliché in software and technology development, and we are perhaps less likely to examine the possibilities that lie along that tension: the power of words in the process of understanding people and creating new things for them.

A few years ago, I took a client into the field to study how

families were using home entertainment technology. We met one family in which the father was visibly proud of his provider role, especially regarding technology. On multiple occasions he mispronounced TiVo, the up-and-coming digital video recorder brand, as “tie-vo.” Without looking, I could feel my client (an engineer) wince every time the father did this. But being a good interviewer, I reflected back the language our respondent was using, and in my follow-up questions, I also referred to “tie-vo.” When my client asked the family a question later in the session, he was physically unable to use the “wrong” pronunciation, and referred to TiVo as “tee-vo.” At that moment, the dynamic in the room shifted critically. The family leader had been shown up by some visitors, and suddenly we were the experts, not him. The interview wasn’t ruined, but after that we were sorely limited in how far we could go. Even the mere pronunciation of a word impacted the interaction.

In contrast, consider my sister, who works as a genetic counselor. Part of her job involves advising patients about the results of genetic tests. These people want to know if they have “the gene” for hereditary breast cancer or hereditary colon cancer. But to a medical professional, the indications on our DNA that

we are subject to some disease are known as mutations. In popular culture, of course, we know mutants as horrifying (if tragically misunderstood) freaks, and who would want to be associated with that, especially when a health care professional is advising you of a newly revealed condition? Yet the term “mutation” is going to come up regularly for the patient as they move through the health care system, and the genetic counselor has an opportunity, if not a responsibility, to prepare them for that experience by explaining and normalizing that word. If they present things as simply and with as little drama as possible, they simply defer the patient’s inevitable encounter with the notion of mutation. If they utilize the term, they have to complicate their counseling session with an additional term to be explained and demystified. The professional has to look for learning moments when the right usage of certain words can arm the patient for future experiences. We encountered an analogous issue with a client who was preparing to launch a product with a number of automatic configuration features. They believed these features would save customers time, but those customers told us they liked that these features would help them get it right the first time,