Language

Mike O’Brien emailed a few hundred colleagues last month to announce his retirement after 32 years at Ford Motor. The sales executive’s note included the obligatory career reflections and thank yous—but came with a twist. Attached to the email was a spreadsheet detailing a few thousand a meticulous log of mixed metaphors and malaprops uttered by co-workers over a decade.

During a 2019 sales meeting to discuss a new vehicle launch, a colleague blurted out: “Let’s not reinvent the ocean.” At another meeting, in 2016, someone started a sentence with: “I don’t want to sound like a broken drum here, but…”

For more than a decade, O’Brien kept a meticulous log of verbal flubs uttered in Ford meetings, from companywide gatherings to side conversations. It documents 2,229 linguistic breaches, including the exact quote, context, name of the perpetrator and color commentary.

There is a leaderboard and a clear GOAT of verbal flubs. The list became so known—and feared—that one executive cursed O’Brien’s name in a meeting after tripping up on an expression. Violators could appeal their inclusion but success was rare. And nobody was above a grammatical roasting: Ford CEO Jim Farley twice made the list.

“We weren’t being mean,” O’Brien said. “It was just funny.”

Possible Preaching Angles: This is an example of good-natured ribbing, but sadly, some of us keep a meticulous list of flubs and offenses and sins that are much more damaging.

New research analyzing nearly 2 billion words from websites across 20 English-speaking countries reveals that Americans lead the pack in online profanity, outswearing even the Brits and Australians by a significant margin.

The findings flip common stereotypes on their head. While we might expect foul-mouthed Aussies or pub-going Brits to claim the digital cursing crown, it’s actually Americans who dominate online vulgarity.

Researchers noted in their study that “The United States, often associated with protestant puritanism, Christian fervor, and prudishness, show the highest rates of vulgarity in online discourse, followed by Great Britain.”

Online anonymity and informal communication styles enable this linguistic freedom. Unlike face-to-face conversations constrained by social hierarchies and formal expectations, digital spaces often feel like consequence-free zones for verbal expression.

Despite common perceptions that Australians are the most profane English speakers —Americans claim the digital crown for creative cursing. Americans apparently reserve their strongest expressions for online spaces where they feel freer to let loose.

When children are exposed to violence on TV and in video games, studies show they tend to become more aggressive themselves. But a study reveals that even just exposure to swear words in media may lead children to become more physically aggressive as well.

In a study involving middle-schoolers in Missouri, researchers asked the students about their exposure to profanity in the media — in particular on television and in video games — as well as their attitudes about swear words and their tendencies toward aggressive behavior. The scientists measured both physical aggression (by asking students whether they hit, kicked, or punched others) and relational aggression (by asking them whether they gossiped about others to damage their reputations).

The researchers calculated that exposure to profanity had about the same relationship to aggressive behavior as exposure to violence on TV or in video games. In addition, they found that the more children were exposed to profanity, they more likely they were to use swear words themselves, and those who used profanity were more likely to become aggressive toward others. Study leader Sarah Coyne said:

From using profanity to aggressive behavior, it was a pretty strong correlation. And these are not even the worst [profane] words that kids are exposed to, since there are seven dirty words that you’re not allowed to say on TV. So, we’re seeing that even exposure to lower forms of profanity are having an effect on behavior.

While bullying behavior was not specifically addressed in the study, children who are more aggressive are known to be more likely to bully. So, controlling youngsters’ exposure to profanity may be one way to stem the tide of bullying among teens.

In November 2019, Coldplay released their eighth album, Everyday Life. In twenty years of professional music, it was the first time that any of Coldplay’s records came with the famous “Parental Advisory” sticker. The whole of the album’s profanity came from three seemingly random “f-bombs.” Not only had Coldplay never had an explicit content warning on any album before. They had never even featured a single profanity on any of their full-length LPs before Everyday Life.

Less than a year later, Taylor Swift released Folklore. The same exact thing happened. Despite a 15+ year history of recording that featured zero strong profanity, Folklore earned the black and white sticker for featuring multiple uses of the f-word. This started a trend for Swift: Every album released since has the same profanity and the same explicit content warning (as is common in the industry, the albums each have a “clean” version that edits out the harshest words).

Both Coldplay and Taylor Swift have historically appealed to a younger, more sensitive demographic. They have a long and successful history of selling their music without profanity.

Tech writer Samuel D. Jones offers the following observations on the use of profanity by Coldplay, Swift, and other artists:

We live in an era where the combination of authenticity and vice means that we are seeing some examples of performative offense. Performative offense is what happens when people indulge in vice less out of a sincere desire to indulge it, and more out of a desire to sell their image in the public square. It’s because many modern Americans now associate vice with authentic lives that leaders and those who aspire to leadership may flaunt vulgar or antisocial behavior on the grounds that such things make them “real” to the masses.

In other words, it’s cool to be bad. It’s cool to sin a little.

For decades, a social psychologist named John Bargh has conducted studies on the way words affect behavior. In one such study, undergraduate students were given a scrambled-sentence test. One version of the test was sprinkled with rude words like “disturb,” “bother,” and “intrude.” Another version was sprinkled with polite words like “respect,” “considerate,” and “yield.” The subjects thought they were taking tests measuring lan­guage ability, but they were actually being subconsciously primed by those words.

Priming is a psychological phenomenon related to stimulus and response, and words are the lead actors. The word “nurse” is recognized more quickly if it’s preceded by the word “doctor.” The same goes for “dog” and “wolf.” Why? These words are semantic primes that cause you to think in categories. If I say Empire State Building, it puts you in a New York state of mind. In the same sense, the word “please” is a politeness prime.

After taking the five-minute scrambled-sentence test, stu­dents were supposed to walk down the hall and talk to the person running the experiment about their next assignment. However, an actor was strategically engaged in conversation with the researcher when the students arrived. The goal? Psychologist Bargh wanted to see whether the subjects who were primed with polite words would wait longer before interrupting than those who were primed with rude words.

The result? Sixty-five percent of the group primed with rude words interrupted the conversation. Those primed with polite words? Eighty-two percent of them never interrupted at all. If the test hadn't timed out at ten minutes, who knows how long they would have waited?

Possible Preaching Angle:

A few polite words. What difference do they make? In quantitative terms, they can make a 47% difference. Don’t underestimate the power of polite words.

If you’re on the operating table, you don’t want your surgeon to say to a nurse, “Hand me one of them sharp thingamajigs.” You want him to have a specific name for a specific tool to perform a specific job.

Words matter. The medical field has distinctive terminology by which it carefully defines diseases, medicines, instruments, and the like. When it comes to our bodies, we have very high expectations of our doctors. They better know what they’re talking about.

We should expect no less—indeed, far more—when it comes to pastors, priests, and teachers of the Word of God. They handle the word of truth. They minister to body, soul, and mind. They better know what they’re talking about. We don’t want to hear from them, “Now that divine power is doing some religious stuff in you.” Precision in language is necessary. We want God’s Word unapologetically, lovingly, and carefully proclaimed to us.

These days, just turning on the television seems to trigger a blitzkrieg of F-bombs.

“We’re seeing a big spike in the use of crude and profane language in movies and TV shows,” says Chad Michael, CEO of EnjoyMoviesYourWay.com, a content-filtering service for smart TVs. He adds, “As it increases, we become numb to it. And that gives writers and media [outlets] permission to add even more.”

Engineers at EnjoyMoviesYourWay.com deploy artificial intelligence to identify crude language in programming, allowing the app to filter thousands of titles. In an analysis for The Wall Street Journal, Enjoy scanned over 60,000 popular movies and TV shows released since 1985 and tracked the usage of bleepable words over time.

In the analysis, usage of the F-word went from 511 in 1985 to 22,177 through early November 2023. The S-word went from 484 in 1985 to 10,864 into November 2023. Of course, the explosion in expletives is also partly due to the sheer volume of programming that’s now available to viewers.

The Financial Times had a story on a fascinating study showing that our language has been growing more pessimistic. Whereas at the time of the scientific and industrial revolutions there was a shift towards a language with more frequent use of terms related to progress, in recent years there’s been a shift towards words associated with caution, worry, and risk.

The author John Burn-Murdoch writes:

[Researchers] found a marked increase in the use of terms related to progress and innovation starting in the early 17th century. This supports the idea that “a cultural evolution in the attitudes towards the potential of science” [to promote the industrial revolution] and its economic take-off.

[But] extending the same analysis to the present, a striking picture emerges: over the past 60 years the west has begun to shift away from the culture of progress, and towards one of caution, worry and risk-aversion, with economic growth slowing over the same period. The frequency of terms related to progress, improvement, and the future has dropped by about 25 percent since the 1960s, while those related to threats, risks and worries have become several times more common.

A nine-year-old boy asked ChatGPT, “Is yo' mama so dumb that when she went to sleep, she put a ruler behind her pillow to see how long she slept?” The chatbot replied, “I'm sorry, but as an AI language model I don't have a ‘mama’ or the ability to feel insulted.”

The nine-year-old's real mom, journalist Linda McRobbie, was disturbed by her son's rude question. She’s not alone. Researchers estimate 54% of all conversations with chatbots contain profanity (often directed at the bot) and 65% contain sexual language. In 2019, about 30% of conversations with Mitsuku, an advanced chatbot contained abusive or sexually harassing language.

We might rationalize that a chatbot is just a thing with no feelings. So, what's the big deal about rudeness? Several things.

One is that part of our brains register our conversation with a chatbot as a social interaction with another person. When we hear the chatbot's voice, we think it's a real person, according to technology researchers.

Secondly, these AI assistants are designed to learn from our interactions with them. Our foul or abusive language may be training Alexa to talk back to us the same way.

Thirdly, we're training ourselves. Author and MIT professor, Sherry Turkle, who studies our relationship with technology says, "Abusing ... Siri, Replika (and other chatbots) coarsens us, not because the chatbots have feelings, but because we do." Forty years of research suggests that “venting” rage even at an inanimate object doesn't reduce anger. It just helps us rehearse it. There's even evidence that how we talk to our chatbots could start to shape our interactions with people.

The moral might be: “Be kind to thy chatbot because you’re practicing human relations.”

U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee recently expressed remorse for her words after an unverified audio recording of her was released to the public. Jackson Lee, who is running for mayor of Houston, was recorded chastising an unnamed staffer with an abusive tone that included several instances of profanity.

The woman in the recording, who sounds like Jackson Lee, said, “I want you to have a (expletive) brain. I want you to have read it. I want you to say, ’Congresswoman, it was such and such date. That’s what I want. That’s the kind of staff that I want to have.” In the recording she’s also heard describing another staffer as a “fat (expletive) idiot.”

While neither confirming nor denying the authenticity of recording, Jackson Lee maintained her desire to treat all her staff members with dignity and respect, and acknowledged that because of her eagerness to effectively serve her constituents, she occasionally falls short of her own standard of conduct.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Those entrusted with positions of authority and responsibility have an obligation to watch what they say. Leaders and public servants need to use words to build up, not to tear down with insults or profanity.

The King James Version of the Bible has been a blessing through the years to countless numbers of people, in many different ways. As 2 Timothy 3:16-17 tells us, the inspired word of God has “thoroughly equipped” the people of God “for every good work and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.” Psalm 119:105 also reminds us that God's Word “is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.”

At a Seminar held in Sri Lanka for students of Journalism a few years ago, Senior Indian Journalist and Politician, M. J. Akbar, highlighted yet another meaningful benefit of the King James Version of the Bible. In his address to aspiring journalists, Mr. Akbar had initially highlighted an urgent need to raise the standards of English writing in print journalism.

Thereafter, he had advised the aspiring journalists to read the King James Version of the Bible, to improve their English. He said, “The basic structure of the English language can be found in the King James Version of the Bible and thus it can be called 'the holy book' for all the journalists.”

So, if you need to improve your English writing skills, a good way to do so would be to read the King James Version of the Bible.

An often-overlooked effect of missionary influence has been the preservation of languages. Language is the breath of a culture, and so the death of a language almost always results in the loss of a way of life. MIT linguist Norvin Richards expressed the importance of the preservation of languages and cultures well: “There are jokes that are only funny in Maliseet and there are songs that are only beautiful in Wôpanâak …. If we lose those languages, we lose little pieces of the beauty and richness of the world.”

In 2019, the United Nations warned, “Almost half the world’s estimated 6,700 languages are in danger of disappearing.” Many minority languages are lost when younger generations are educated in national languages. Written languages have a much better chance of survival than exclusively oral ones and many small, unique languages have been preserved by Bible translation.

In one remarkable case, the Wôpanâak language was brought back to life a hundred years after its last speakers died. The linguistic revival was based on the translation work of missionary John Eliot. The first Bible published in colonial America was in the Wôpanâak language in 1663. As a result of Eliot’s literacy efforts, the Wampanoag tribe left behind a collection of written documents when disease ravaged their population.

In the 1990s, Jessie Little Doe Baird, a descendant of the tribe Eliot sought to reach, used those records to revive the Wôpanâak language as part of a linguistics program at MIT. Her daughter is the first native Wôpanâak speaker in seven generations and six other Wampanoags have become fluent in the language. Interestingly, one of Baird’s Wampanoag ancestors publicly opposed missionary work in the eighteenth century.

Puerto Rican rapper Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, also known as Bad Bunny, recently opened the telecast of 2023 Grammy Awards. It was the first time a musical act that does not primarily speak or sing in English was featured in such a prestigious timeslot. As a result, many Latin American people beamed in pride at seeing someone from their culture (or one adjacent to theirs) be represented on such a big stage.

But one particular detail caused a stir in the immediate wake of the telecast. Viewers responded in real time on social media platforms to the way that Bad Bunny’s performance was captured by the live closed-captioning text at the bottom of the screen. His words and music were not transcribed, but rather described simply as “non-English.”

This was a disappointment for viewers hoping to see a live transcription of Bad Bunny’s Spanish lyrics, considering that he’d been nominated for Album of the Year. That oversight was particularly galling, according Melissa Harris-Perry of WNYC, because it was so avoidable.

Harris-Perry said, “Bad Bunny does not generally or ever perform in English, right? I mean, this should not have been a surprise.”

Dr. Bonilla is director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (at CUNY), and a guest of Harris-Perry’s podcast . Bonilla says that Bad Bunny is so important to Puerto Rican audiences in part because of his refusal to cater to English-speaking audiences, which is causing the industry to change.

Bonilla said, “Okay, you're making history here. For the first time, you have a Spanish language act nominated for Album of the Year. This is the largest streaming artist in the world. You know that he sings and speaks only in Spanish. Do better, Grammys.”

The good news is that this is less a function of malice than of lack of planning or intentionality. Hopefully, the Grammys will be ready the next time they feature a Spanish-speaking act so prominently in their telecast.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Language is one of the ways that we define and reinforce culture. The church can also be sensitive to this and welcome other language speakers into God's family. We can assist in that mission by accommodating the languages of vulnerable people with less power or influence.

Russian spies are scattered throughout Ukraine. We would expect no less. But Ukrainians have figured out how to ferret out many of the Russian spies wandering around their country.

While the languages spoken in Russia and Ukraine are similar, there are significant differences. For example, the phonetic spelling of the first names of the respective leaders of both countries. They share the same name, yet they spell their names and pronounce their names with nuanced differences. In transliteration, it’s Vladimir for Putin and Volodymyr for Zelensky. Sounds are automatic giveaways because of the different emphasis of certain vowel and consonant collections in Ukrainian versus Russian.

And so, Ukrainians use a shibboleth involving the name of a popular bakery item. It is the name of a bread called palianytsia. Russians cannot properly pronounce the name of the bread. Try as they might, palianytsia does not come tripping off their tongues. Even if they can say it once, they trip up when saying it three times in a row. And they’ve been outed, caught, and uncovered. The fluffy loaf of bread catches spies in Ukraine like a lie detector.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Jesus taught that what comes out of a person's mouth defiles them. Because it shows something about our nature that cannot long be hidden.

On-air announcer Glenn Consor was doing what he’s paid to do at an NBA game: giving off-the-cuff commentary to the events as they unfolded. But this moment would end up being a notorious chapter in his broadcasting career.

Consor is the color analyst for NBC Sports Washington which covers the Washington Wizards. As such, he had a perfect view of Houston Rockets guard Kevin Porter, Jr. as he launched a game-winning three-pointer to defeat the Wizards on their home floor. In the shock of the moment, Consor said the following: “You’ve got to give credit. Kevin Porter Jr., like his dad, pulled that trigger right at the right time.”

Consor made the paternal reference because he assumed the Rockets guard was the son of former Washington Bullets standout Kevin Porter. But he was wrong. The father of the Rockets’ Kevin Porter Jr. did not previously play in the NBA.

However, back in 1993 Porter’s father did plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter in the shooting death of a fourteen-year-old, a conviction for which he spent four-and-a-half years in prison. So many fans were offended at the comment, because it appeared as though Consor was glibly making a double entendre of Porter Jr. and his father’s criminal background.

But Consor meant no such harm. He had no idea that his use of the phrase “pulling the trigger” would be interpreted literally and was mortified when he found out about his mistake. The next day he offered the following apology:

Please allow me to take this opportunity to sincerely apologize to Kevin Porter Jr., his family and the Rockets organization for the comments I made during last night’s game. I mistakenly thought that Kevin was the son of former Washington player Kevin Porter and was unaware that the words I chose to describe his game-winning shot would be in any way hurtful or insensitive. I have reached out Kevin to personally apologize and hope to be able to talk with him soon.

Possible Preaching Angle:

As Christians we are called to own up to our mistakes and ask forgiveness when our words hurt others, even when we mean no harm.

Women and girls across the nation are lamenting the notoriety of their name being associated with virtual assistants. Since the release of Amazon’s voice assistant in 2014, anyone named Alexa has been subject to an uptick of joking and teasing about their name.

When The Washington Post did an analysis of data from the Social Security Administration, they found that approximately 6,000 baby girls were named Alexa in 2015, bringing the total number of American citizens with the name to about 130,000. But in the years since, the popularity of the name has plummeted.

Alexa Morales was contacted by The Washington Post about her predicament. Says Morales, “When I hear my name now, it’s not good thoughts … it’s like, tensing.” Morales eventually started going by “Lex,” as a way to distance herself from the Amazon product. “It was like, you guys have so much money and so many people working for you and not one person thought to be like, ‘Listen, Alexa is a name that people use.’”

Alexa Smith said, “I’ve heard all the jokes at this point. Somebody thought it was funny at work to just call me Siri.”

When contacted, Amazon offered the following statement:

Bullying of any kind is unacceptable, and we condemn it in the strongest possible terms. We designed our voice assistant to reflect qualities we value in people — being smart, considerate, empathetic, and inclusive. As an alternative to Alexa, we offer several other wake words customers can choose from, including Echo, Computer, Amazon and Ziggy.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Servanthood - No one wants to be called a name that's associated with subservience, but that's exactly what Jesus did by emptying himself and taking on the form of a servant. 2) Mocking – It is never acceptable to mock or put someone else down to showcase our own “humor.” We should be considerate of the feelings of others and stand with them.

A "slip of the tongue" by an air traffic controller at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport saw two planes come within 300 feet of crashing into each other in July, 2020.

A United Airlines flight from Newark, NJ was making its approach to land at the same time that an EasyJet was preparing to take off for Malaga, Spain. The Newark flight was supposed to be assigned to land on runway 09L, as the Malaga flight was cleared to take off from runway 09R.

Due to an unfortunate slip of the tongue, however, the controller gave clearance for Newark to land on 09R, instead of 09L. Furthermore, the controller didn’t have direct line-of-sight access to runway 09R because of an equipment malfunction.

Eventually, the Malaga flight asked why the Newark plane was given clearance to land on their runway, and warned of the imminent collision. The Newark plane was instructed to abort the landing and ascend, but by the time it engaged the evasive maneuver, the two planes were only 300 feet apart.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Even in situations that seem routine, our words still have tremendous power to heal or hurt, build or destroy. Being careless with the tongue is akin to flirting with calamity.

Veteran ESPN on-air talent Rachel Nichols was planning to work as a sideline reporter during the 2021 NBA Finals. Instead, she was replaced by another reporter, Malika Andrews. Nichols was sidelined by ESPN because of some comments she made during 2020’s NBA Finals. She was on a phone call but was accidentally recorded by a camera in her hotel room which was later uploaded to ESPN’s servers without her knowledge. In the footage, she is heard speaking disparagingly about another coworker, Maria Taylor (who is now with NBC Sports), implying that Taylor was chosen to cover the NBA Finals because she is Black.

Nichols, who is white, was heard saying the following:

I wish Maria Taylor all the success in the world — she covers football, she covers basketball … If you need to give her more things to do because you are feeling pressure about your crappy longtime record on diversity ... which, by the way, I know personally from the female side of it — like, go for it. Just find it somewhere else. You are not going to find it from me or taking my thing away.

Once the footage was discovered by another ESPN employee, it had been distributed internally for months until it was leaked to The New York Times for a report in early July. On ESPN’s “The Jump,” she made a special effort to address the controversy:

[I didn’t] want to let this moment pass without saying how much I respect, how much I value our colleagues here at ESPN. (And) how deeply, deeply sorry I am for disappointing those I hurt, particularly Maria Taylor, and how grateful I am to be part of this outstanding team.

Kendrick Perkins, a Black former-NBA-player costars on “The Jump,” seemed to accept her apology, and thanked her for “accepting responsibility” for her error in judgment.

Possible Preaching Angle:

If we speak haphazardly about others in our community, we risk sowing confusion and dissension. Words spoken in private still have tremendous power, and more so when they are revealed in public.