Item #3: Why Words Matter

My inbox greeted me recently with a daily message from an industry publication. The headline caught my attention because it compared a client relationship issue to a serious mental disorder. The association was meant to draw attention, and it did, but it nagged at me, for the following reason:



Language affects thinking. We should concern ourselves with the words we use to describe things as a responsible response to a principle called the linguistic relativity principle, or the Sapirs-Whorf hypothesis.

What this principle states is that “thinking is shaped by language, that linguistic categories define conceptual ones. The idea is that discourse doesn't just convey thought but partly determines it.” (wikipedia.org)

Or more simply:

“If we change how we talk for the better, we'll change how we think for the better.”

(C.G. Prado, 2006, Political Correctness: Changing language to change thinking).