Avoid any words that denigrate subjects
Carefully choose nouns, adjectives to reveal truth
Pope Francis must have smiled last week as he exhorted communications personnel at the Vatican to swear off adjectives and stick to nouns. “I am allergic to those words,” he said of the modifiers writers and speakers of all kinds employ to make distinctions and give their discourse tone and texture.
While his eyes may have twinkled, the pope wasn’t joking. He meant to call out the way we use adjectives to denigrate or dehumanize the subjects we name. He offered the seemingly innocuous example of referring to some colleagues, group members, or fellow citizens as genuine or authentic, thereby implying that others are phony or not to be taken seriously.
Francis’ sensitivity to language stems from his job description. The pope must hold together a vast, diverse, and occasionally contentious community in a shared identity and common sense of purpose. Especially in this digital age in which every cruel or judgmental utterance can go viral, a tweet full of adjectives can shred unity that took centuries to nurture. Nouns and verbs can also divide and demonize, but Francis knows adjectives can behave subtly as serpents.
The United States has roughly a quarter of the population the pope tries to keep together. Currently, however, our adjective problem dwarfs by geometric proportions that which troubles the pontiff.
For starters, a few of our older, most honorable adjectives like “liberal,” “conservative,” and “patriotic” have come to mean things significantly different than they did 20 or so years ago. Patriots were once the seditious rebels who fought the British monarchy, and not so long ago, everyone who cares deeply for the country and the values it has historically struggled to uphold qualified as patriotic. Many today reserve the term for the few who never question or criticize our government’s hostile actions toward not only those who threaten or have harmed us, but also those of whom our leaders merely disapprove. Both liberal and conservative have meant different things in our history as well, but today they serve as pejorative terms for all citizens whose vision for the nation “we” reject.
Most everyone knows our Tweeter in Chief loves adjectives, and linguists who study his Twitter bursts have identified his favorites. They include some the pope might approve, depending on what nouns they modify, among them amazing, terrific, tremendous, and incredible. Others, like stupid, weak, dangerous, and bad seem meant to divide the population into groups we should listen to and care about, or not. Two more favorites, classy and smart, sound positive, although in context they most often subtly assert that certain others are stupid and lack character.
At this point in our nation’s history, we would do well to adopt
Pope Francis’ allergy to adjectives that blatantly dehumanize others as well as those that subtly but nefariously sort us into pools of caricatures. We must also dare to disappoint the pope, however, for sometimes we need adjectives in order to see and to tell the truth. Currently that list includes unethical, illegal, criminal, unconstitutional, and even impeachable. We dare not pretend we can our should tolerate anything and everything a president does simply because he is the president and this is how he habitually behaves. Elected citizens charged with the task must carefully examine all the facts, nouns, and verbs, and then determine as best they can whether the adjectives that prescribe our legal boundaries apply. Regardless of all the angry, adjectival arrows the president may hurl their way, they must do that work for all of us. If they fail to do it responsibly, even our best adjectives will mean little.