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,
