Good.
Bad. These are two words that have come back into public language
recently.
Unfortunately, they are words which express the extremes of a
moral spectrum and have been returned to politics via the snarling mouth
of US liar-in-chief Donald Trump.
I
have tended to think that using a word like 'good' is a clear one and
therefore better than saying something is 'appropriate'.
We can easily
discuss why X, Y or Z is good or bad (and just as importantly, who
something is good or bad for) but it is much more difficult to say why
something is appropriate.
That is why it has been a popular word with
pre-Trump politicians looking for a sneaky way to justify the
unjustifiable.
I
remember first hearing the word appropriate when I started out as a
secondary school teacher in the mid-1990s.
Students would often be told
that their behaviour was inappropriate and I could see that this word
had no meaning for them, apart from being prohibitive.
It would have
been a lot more educational to tell them that they had done something
that was disrespectful, dangerous, illogical or even thoughtless.
Of
course it could be argued that all this concern with words is just for
writers and teachers and is some kind of an academic exercise that has
no relevance for the average person.
After all, they are only words,
right?
I would simply reply: tell that to the Roma rights groups. Only a
couple of years ago they felt compelled to protest against a decision
by Spain's Royal Language Academy (RAE) to include a definition of a
gypsy as a 'swindler' in their new official dictionary.
Words inform and
they can also misinform. Trump and May and Le Pen and Wilders know this
all too well.
Others
have noted the importance of language across society. Writing in the
Spanish newspaper El Pais, Josep Ramoneda argued that "the struggle for
power, anywhere, is also the struggle for the control of words.
The one
who imposes his verbal categories on the public mind wins. Example: the
word austerity."
His opinion is that "people are accepting it as
something inevitable. Austerity is one of the terms of virtue. From it
derives a whole chain of complementary words: sacrifice, rigor,
responsibility, etc."
Ignoring all shades of grey in his black and white universe, Donald Trump tells anyone listening what is bad and what is good but he almost never uses the word ‘because’ to explain why things can be categorised so neatly.
He asserts. He insists. If he and the others like him are to be countered, it will be for the rest of us to do the explaining.
Through clear imagery and equally simple words.
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, April 2017.]
