Given the dialogue over the use of the R-Word in the movie Tropic Thunder, here’s an interesting excerpt from an interview with Annabelle Lukin, linguist at the University of Macquire in Sydney. In the interview, Lukin explains how words get their power.
Sticks and stones do break bones, but it is only through language that actions can be explained, justified, defended, made palatable. It is through language that an ‘enemy’ is defined. In these processes, word choice is important, but it is through the patterning of grammatical choices that a particular take on reality is constructed. The choice of words is largely conscious. It is overt, and can, therefore, be monitored. Grammatical patterning is for all speakers mostly entirely unconscious. In any war, grammar is the first, and most important covert operation.
As teachers, parents, journalists, politicians, or simply as citizens, it becomes more urgent each day for us all to understand how grammar works, how it powers language, our most important tool for creating our competing realities.
Language is not an empty medium for the expression of separate, pre-existing ideas. Instead, language is the means by which we organise and shape our experience.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s805188.htm
