#261: Weapon Words, Double-Talk & Garden Path Sentences
3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Miss Leading Words
I. Weapon Words
Words are weapons. Some are wielded by your enemies. Some are employed by your kids. Jerry Seinfeld knows a particularly lethal Weapon Word:
“Chill” is a weapon word that kids [use]. Have you experienced this, you say to your kid, “How are you doing?” and they say, “Chill, dad. Chill.”
“I just said, ‘How are you doing?’”
“Just chill. Chill.”
It’s an example of how a perfectly innocent word can become a sharp conversational sword.
Kids are basically running rhetorical drills without knowing it. They experiment with phrases and discover how language can shift the balance of a conversation.
Then adulthood arrives. The games stop being games, and those same tactics grow into the more polished, less innocent strategies adults use to torture each other with. Such as…
II. Double-Talk
You’ve heard Double-Talk quite a bit. Probably more than you’d ever wished for. It’s the term for language that’s intentionally ambiguous and filled with buzzword-heavy drivel. It’s common in corporate or political speech, where you’ll often find it in the form of euphemisms designed to disguise bad news.
Rapid unscheduled disassembly (RUD)
…is what SpaceX called it when their Starship rocket exploded into a fireball.
Involuntary denial of boarding
…is what the CEO of United Airlines called it when security officers forcefully dragged a paid passenger off an overbooked flight.
Pushing forward into rearward space
…is what we used to say instead of the nasty word “retreat” when I was in the army.
Sometimes, Double-Talk is deployed in all earnestness; sometimes it’s used ironically. And sometimes, you just can’t figure out whether they’re being serious.
III. Garden-Path Sentences
Garden-Path Sentences are grammatically correct constructions. You’ll have no problems pronouncing the words correctly. However, they mislead you at the level of meaning, taking advantage of your familiarity with one possible interpretation over another.
The old man the boat.
…is a wonderful example. Is the old man a boat? Are we missing a verb? Is it a mere enumeration? It’s neither. The sentence deceives you by playing with the word ‘old’. It appears as an adjective describing the noun ‘man’. In fact, ‘old’ is the noun and ‘man’ is used as a verb: “The elderly are getting into the boats,” so to speak. The reason why you can eventually figure it out has to do with context and your knowledge of the real world.
It shows how we launch into a sentence with certain assumptions and expectations. Then get confused when encountering ambiguous information. But continuously re-evaluate its meaning with each new word.
👉 Taken from my article about Peculiar Phenomena of the English Language
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Have a great week,
Chris
themindcollection.com