9/12/2018
Opinion: A Linguist's Defense Of 'Falsehood' : NPR
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< Opinion: A Linguist's Defense Of 'Falsehood'
September 7, 2018 · 1:24 PM ET
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DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. We feel surrounded by mendacity and deception these days,
whether in political discourse or the online forums we visit. Our linguist Geoff
Nunberg has been thinking about when we label a lie a lie or call it something else.
GEOFF NUNBERG, BYLINE: In his essay on liars, Montaigne famously wrote that the
truth has a single face while its opposite has 100,000 faces. That disproportion is
reflected in the English dictionary. We have only a handful of words to describe
statements that correspond to reality, like correct and accurate. In fact, we don't even
have a single word that means tell the truth, which is probably to our credit. But we
have a vast vocabulary to describe all the way statements can depart from reality. And
it's gotten a considerable workout over the last couple of years.
Every news cycle seems to bring a new claim from the White House or elsewhere that
cries out for correction and sends editors and journalists to their thesauruses, as
politics makes linguists of us all. Should they simply qualify the statement itself? And
if so, should it be called false or questionable, spurious or bogus, misleading or
baseless? Or should they directly challenge the speaker's sincerity and use the charged
word lie?
The establishment media have been pondering that question at length. A few of them,
like the New York Times, allow themselves to use lie more or less sparingly. But a great
many others have consigned the word to the verba non grata file. They argue that lie
implies an intent to deceive, and you can't objectively observe what somebody
believes. In fact, sometimes they don't even know themselves. And even when
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Opinion: A Linguist's Defense Of 'Falsehood' : NPR
someone's deceptive intent is obvious, calling a statement a lie is invariably
antagonistic. You can't use the word dispassionately. As the Oxford English Dictionary
puts it, lie is a violent expression of moral reprobation. But that's exactly why a lot of
people demand that journalists call out lies whenever they see them.
The New York Times Maggie Haberman provoked a torrent of indignant tweets earlier
this year when she described two of the president's statements as demonstrable
falsehoods rather than lies. One journalist tweeted that falsehood should be removed
from the dictionary - adding let's call a lie a lie. The linguist Dennis Baron says that
calling lies falsehoods is pulling your punch. But not so fast - it's true that falsehood
can sometimes be just a decorous synonym for a lie. But often it's just the word we
want. It's an old-fashioned word with the fusty ring of the pulpit, and we rarely use it
in everyday speech. But falsehood can have a moral weight of its own - especially when
we are more concerned about the effects of what someone says than about whether
they were being insincere about it.
The birther story is a quintessential falsehood - a narrative feeding on malice and
ignorance, which took on an independent life as it passed from one person to the next.
In that sense of the word, a falsehood does its work whether the person spreading it
believes it or not. Modern communication technologies have created powerful
resources for publicizing and circulating falsehoods. They permeate social media
where we call them by other names. They're misinformation, propaganda or fake
news. Those words don't apply to individual statements but to concerted efforts to
shape public opinion. They're relatively recent words. They only date from the rise of
the mass media. And their meanings have been disputed ever since.
Even so, the engineers at Facebook find themselves in the unenviable position of
trying to reduce them to rules that they can hand to their moderators, to police what
they rather wistfully describe as the Facebook community. Facebook says they'll take
down content that's doing harm or attacking individuals. But they won't block
something just because it's false. Their argument recalls the one that journalists give
for their reluctance to call some statement a lie. How can you tell whether people
believe what they're saying or not? In a recent interview with Recode's Kara Swisher,
Mark Zuckerberg explained why they wouldn't remove the pages of Holocaust deniers.
It's hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent, he said. There are things that
different people get wrong. I don't think that they're intentionally getting it wrong. He
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Opinion: A Linguist's Defense Of 'Falsehood' : NPR
said that Facebook might demote the post in the news feed, but they won't just remove
it.
A lot of people found those remarks distressing. Shortly after the interview, the Anne
Frank Center announced that they had gathered 150,000 signatures on a petition
calling on Facebook to remove Holocaust-denial pages. The fact is that saying the
Holocaust didn't happen isn't simply getting your facts wrong, like confusing Benicio
Del Toro with Antonio Banderas or saying that carrots help you see in the dark.
Whoever utters it is spreading a malignant falsehood whether they're devious people
or merely deluded ones. As the tech entrepreneur and social activist Mitch Kapor said,
the intent of Holocaust deniers is not the sole standard of judgment. It's the impact
that matters.
In the current climate, it's easy to get fixated on mendacity in high places. But bear in
mind that the word truth has two antonyms. Sometimes we contrast truth with lies
and sometimes truth with falsehoods. We need both words. Even transparent or
trivialize erode our trust in one another. And when lies are more consequential, they
can be amplified into pervasive falsehoods that distort the way people see the world.
DAVIES: Geoff Nunberg is a linguist at the University of California Berkeley School of
Information. On Monday's show, James Beard Award-winning chef Jose Andres tells
us about preparing millions of meals for people in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.
Arriving in San Juan days after the hurricane, he stayed for months and recruited an
army of volunteers. Andres wants governments and nonprofits to rethink how we feed
people in a natural disaster. His new memoir is "We Fed An Island." Hope you can join
us.
Fresh AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is
Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman and
Julian Herzfeld Our associate producer for digital media is Molly Seavy-Nesper.
Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross, I'm Dave Davies.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEO FELICIANO SONG, "ANACAONA")
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