The “Semantic Shift” or “Deterioration” Effect
The word sweeps has started being used by mainstream media locally, and even by some elected officials, before some reverted back to the police preferred “cleanup” terminology. Some anti-sweeps advocates refuse to call the new mega shelter the Nevada Cares Campus, preferring the acronym NCC or calling it a compound, or much, much worse, alluding to incarceration and tragedies in human history.
Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics in the English department at University of Nevada, Reno, calls this the “semantic shift” effect, “because semantics is obviously about meaning. There's a lot of times it's not just semantic shift, it's semantic deterioration, which means that terms start to get a negative association when we have used them in negative context over and over and over again. “
Different usage of gender pronouns, those who say “cancel culture” versus those who say “facing consequences,” acronyms for government programs rather than using full names, we seem to be on the frontlines of linguistic battles played out mostly on social media.
“I think, yes, we're in a very salient cultural moment,” Fridland said. “And what you find, if you look back to any kinds of language change, historically in any era, they really reflect cultural moments. If you look back to 2000, you look at what the words of the year were in dictionaries or even in newspapers, you'll find they all had to do with Y2K, with technological advances, with computers … They reflect what concerns us from a cultural standpoint. So I don't think that there's a huge difference in the types of pressures that are causing language change today. We've had those throughout time. What's different is perhaps the pressures that we're responding to. In the 19th century, when we were getting towards the end of the 19th century, people were very concerned with industrialization. People were very concerned with the rise of feminism. So women terms became sort of hotbeds for controversies. And what you find now is the things that concern us are our ethnicity, gender, right? Those are the cultural moments we're living right now. So I don't think the actual pressure to change linguistically is different than it was 200 years ago, but what's different is the types of pressure socially we're responding to.”
Sweeps, a Word Avoided by Some
This applies locally to the sweeps versus cleanup debate.
“There is a lot of evidence that the words we choose to describe things affects the perception by others of what we're describing,” Fridland explains. “And so when you say they’ve been doing sweeps, when you talk about sweeps in other contexts, the associations are often sort of clearing out criminalized kind of activity. But I think the police want to use cleanup because they want to present it in a light that suggests, okay, ‘we're actually doing something good for the community.’ There's not an idea of maybe we're hiding something in a way, sweeping something under the rug. You eat clean, you clean your house. All the cleans we do are good things. So when we're trying to characterize something in a negative light, like it's a bad thing, sweeps is obviously going to help us with that perception instead of trying to describe it as cleanup, then we're saying, oh, look at this wonderful cleanup we're doing. And also think about the orientation that it gives when you're talking about cleaning up, you're talking about whatever is being cleaned up is unimportant, but the benefit comes to those who are doing the cleaning up.”
Does image above make you think of a campus?
Shelter, Another Word Avoided at the “Cares Campus”
What about officials now almost never calling the Nevada Cares Campus a shelter anymore? Fridland says there is a negative connotation now to the word shelter.
“People, when they go to a retirement home, you don’t say they are going to an old age shelter, why because no one would want to go there because shelters are usually places that are protecting you from some harm, or that are places where we put people as holding tanks while we figure out what to do.”
What about the word campus, rather than compound for example? “Where do we have campuses? We invent the symbolism of what it means to put people that are having a second chance, right. Someplace they can learn, someplace they can be enriched, some place where positive things follow. It's going to a place of enrichment of learning, of education, of openness. A shelter is more like a holding tank, right? A place where people just go for whatever reason, but not necessarily for enhancement. And then care is sort of saying, we're all in this together. So it's an idea of community. So versus a homeless shelter, which only is a term that we use when talking about people that are not us, we're not involved with right? By calling it a homeless shelter, you're saying it is involving people that are met by that description of homelessness. So it's sort of separating and isolating in that way. It's completely taking the focus off the homeless and putting it on all of us, as a community. So it's a pretty ingenious working of a word or a term that had a negative associated with it.”
For those who don’t believe the “Cares Campus” is living up to its name, and use NCC instead, or much worse to describe it, Fridland said “we use some sort of derogatory label for things when we don't like it. So I think it's just sort of a counter to all the associations that come with it from a positive perspective that are the sense of community, the sense of enrichment. If you don't want to bring up those associations, then it makes sense to [use] a different label.”
The sweeps from camps where people had been encouraged to assemble followed the opening of the new compound.
Social Media Opportunities for Effective Branding
Social media Fridland says hasn’t enhanced our savvy ways to name things, but it has created opportunities for large scale branding and marketing.
“That's the difference between now and a hundred years ago is the internet, right? So it's not so much that we're naming things in a better fashion, but we're advertising them better. We're using the power of social media to get the word out better. And so if you can post a flyer and it goes to 100 people, that's great, but if you can send out a tweet and it goes to five million, then that, that term, or that word is going to be taken as the one much more readily than a term that's seen by a hundred people. Now that we can broadcast, you know, thousands of miles just by doing a tweet or a YouTube video or something like that, the same name gets picked up all over the place. And that's what's become very savvy. Then if you can brand it and you can sell that brand quickly, then it takes on this power, which in previous times we didn't have the power to do.”
Our Town Reno Interview with Valerie Fridland
Dr. Valerie Fridland is Professor of sociolinguistics and former Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Nevada in Reno. An expert on the relationship between language and society, her work has appeared in numerous academic journals and she is co-author of the book Socio-phonetics from Cambridge University Press. Her language blog, Language in the Wild, is featured in Psychology Today, and her lecture series, Language and Society, is featured with The Great Courses. She is also working on her first book for a popular audience, coming out with Viking/Penguin. She regularly appears on podcasts and programs such as The Elegant Warrior, The Mentor Project, The Lisa Show, CBS news, and Newsy’s The Why.