﻿You know I used to burn my initials into all my stuff with a soldering iron, but
I don’t know if it’s really my thing anymore. I’m thinking about rebranding.
If you hang out with children of a certain age, you may notice that they’ll sometimes
invent new words for things - It’s not guacamole, it’s green butter. It’s not a cartwheel, it’s a
starfish circle. It’s not a restaurant, it’s a dinner store. Coining new terms for established
ideas can be cute when children do it, but it can also be an annoying feature of marketing
campaigns - rebranding some well-established technology and then insisting that it’s something
new and exciting, just because the name is different. The Juicero was advertised as
“the world’s first at-home, cold-press juicing system,” and it’s…a juice dispenser.
“Ride-sharing tech companies" like Uber and Lyft are…taxi services. Someone trying to sell
you on “co-living strategies to reduce housing costs and disrupt real estate markets” would be
*disappointed* if you successfully connected their brilliant “new” idea to the word “roommates.”
The deliberate reinvention of terminology is pretty distinct from the natural evolution of
language over time. Every era has its own slang. Words like “thou”
or “yeet” and styles of speech are added and dropped from common use all the time,
but when someone intentionally snubs a word that accurately communicates an idea in favor of some
neologism, there are really two options - either the speaker *doesn’t know* that there’s already
a term for the idea, as with the dinner store, or their goal is something other than communication.
In the case of marketing hype, the goal is to get you excited about handing over your money
for a newfangled product that isn’t actually newfangled at all. But there are also more
insidious ways to wield novel terminology. In his book “Language and Control,” Linguist Roger
Fowler and colleagues investigate numerous ways that the *structure* of language can be harnessed
for political objectives, a field of study that has become known as “Critical Discourse Analysis.”
We’re all familiar with the use of words to argue and convince people of certain ideas,
but Fowler is after something deeper, how *the way* we talk can constrain or reinforce how
people think about those ideas. A classic example is the use of passive voice to conceal agency, to
make some event read like an accident rather than a deliberate action. The sentence “5 milligrams of
nicotine were administered to each test subject.” might be *logically* equivalent to the sentence “I
injected each mouse with 5 milligrams of nicotine.” but they *feel* very different.
They draw our attention to different aspects of the situation. A person who cares about animal
rights might not even realize that the first sentence means “a person is harming animals,” and
we wouldn’t be surprised if, in order to avoid pissing off those sorts of people, researchers
in fields that *require* hurting animals might develop a stylistic preference for the passive
voice. Fowler asserts there are similarly subtle forces at work in the renaming of stuff that
already has perfectly adequate terminology, a practice he dubs “relexicalisation,” derived
from the term “lexicalization” meaning “inventing completely new words to fill out a lexicon.”
Fowler asserts that relexicalization can be used to control the landscape of the conversation,
establishing a one-way flow of information from the renamer to their intended audience,
dictating the framework of categories and concepts that should be admitted to the discussion.
He cites a trial of fifteen political dissidents who insisted that,
because they didn’t recognize the authority of the court, they should be referred to as “observers”
of the trial - not “the accused” or “defendants.” Of course, despite the fact that what you call
a group of people on trial doesn’t really seem like it should matter, the court categorically
rejected their request. When local newspapers reported on the event, they put “observers” in big
ironic quotation marks to make sure nobody got the impression that this was an appropriate term.
That might seem like a silly pedantic word game, but if the court or the paper were to allow these
people to rebrand themselves as “observers,” it would open up a whole can of worms,
giving ground to a conceptual framework controlled by the…people…in the courtroom. Letting the new
word into the court record would come with a whole set of questions and possibilities that
weren’t there when they were just “defendants” - *is* the court’s authority legitimate? What,
exactly, is happening in this trial - justice or performance? For Fowler,
subbing in new terminology for existing words can also be a mechanism for an authority to accumulate
even more power thru ambiguity. Contracts written in impenetrable legalese, byzantine legislation,
and incomprehensible corporate bureaucracy all command a great deal more power than they claim
by inventing new classes and categories that are…pretty close to words we already have, but
juuuust different enough to make anyone who didn’t come up with the rules nervous that they might be
misinterpreting something. …is the property I’m trying to sell “free *and* clear?” Do my expenses
really qualify as “out-of-pocket?” Am I absolutely sure I have a *verified* premium plus membership?
Better not make too many waves, keep your head down, and hope you’re not breaking any rules.
Relexicalization can also be corrosive to the development of knowledge. Sometimes, there’s a
significant problem with technical terminology that is good cause for some renaming - maybe
a term’s not specific enough, maybe there’s confusion caused by how much it sounds like
a different term. But sometimes…well…in 1994, diabetes researcher Mary Tai published a paper
titled “A Mathematical Model for the Determination of Total Area Under Glucose Tolerance and
Other Metabolic Curves,” where she detailed a method for estimating the area under a curve by
drawing regular trapezoids, finding their areas, and adding them up, a technique she dubbed “Tai’s
Formula.” If you’ve taken an intro to calculus class, you might recognize Tai’s Formula as…the
trapezoidal rule, an approach to estimating area that has been in use since Ancient Babylon.
Tai’s paper has been cited almost 500 times. Some of those citations are commentary, some are in it
for the meme, but a not-insignificant number of scientists have published papers making use of
"Tai’s Formula.” You might say; well what's the big deal? If it's the same method,
if people can use it to solve their problems, who cares what it's called? Well, to answer that,
let’s talk about librarianship for a second. There are several standards like the Library of Congress
Subject Headings dedicated to creating “controlled vocabularies,” a narrow set of judiciously-chosen
terms used to index and organize literature in a way that makes it easy to know where to look
for information on a particular subject. The list of headings is tightly controlled because
any redundancy or overlap would arbitrarily separate books dealing with the same subject,
leading to ambiguity and confusion. It’s the same deal with Tai’s relexicalization of the
trapezoidal rule - there’s an enormous body of literature going back thousands of years,
hundreds of thousands of rigorous academic works detailing every trick, every pitfall, every nook
and cranny of the thing, If you go looking for some insight into the trapezoidal rule,
you’ll find a ton of useful information. If you go looking for insight into Tai’s formula, you’ll
find...her paper…and not much else. Continuity of terminology is important if we want to be
able to find and build on prior knowledge, rather than simply renaming it every few decades.
At the intersection of political and indexical in the Venn diagram of relexicalization, there’s a
particularly troublesome sort of renaming intended to cultivate amnesia for an idea’s history,
to rebrand something, and in so doing, divorce it from its…inconvenient past. Sometimes that’s
just a business strategy, as with the hype engine trying to convince us that co-living
is definitely an exciting development that will shake up real estate and is
definitely *not* saddled with all the drawbacks and troublesome implications of roommates.
Some academics will rename a philosophical tradition or ideology in order to advocate for it
while sidestepping historic problems and critiques - people may have pointed questions if you lobby
for “utilitarianism” full-stop, but they might just nod along with you if you push your ideas as
“scientific morality,” which you define as being *like* utilitarianism but…better. Without the
icky bits. In these sorts of scenarios, the people relexicalizing these concepts are both
establishing a new framework where *they* get to decide what is and is not part of the new
conceptual landscape, *and* to sever the ideas from any existing body of knowledge, either by
omission or by insistence that they are, in fact, different. It’s a clever way to both take credit
for any good ideas from that history of thought & avoid talking about any of the problems.
Inventing new words and new senses of old words is an important and useful activity - it would be
petty to deny Zoomers their caps, kins, stans, or drips simply because these words have some
linguistic precedent. But I think there’s an important distinction to be made between
the constant, irrepressible evolution of language and the strategic or negligent renaming of ideas.
Even if we stop short of the semi-mystical power that’s sometimes ascribed to names and naming,
the reasons people might have for coining new terms and coercing,
demanding, or enforcing their use over old ones may warrant careful consideration.
Sometimes, relexicalization can be justified - people can have good reasons for deliberately
retiring old words, but I think it’s a practice that should be justified, rather than simply
allowed without comment. Especially if someone’s trying to charge $125 for “the world's first
private pop up space suitable for all your relaxation needs.” Tent. It’s a tent.
Can you think of any examples of someone inventing new terms because the old ones are inconvenient
or unknown to them? Does it say anything that it took me 2 weeks of research to figure out
what the phenomenon is called? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you THUNK.