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Choose your words carefully
1 Sep, 2009 By: Daniel G. Jacobs LM Direct!<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
The English language is extraordinarily nuanced. We have access to an arsenal of 250,000 words to as many as 1,000,000 — depending how you want to define the word “word.” And this living language is constantly changing with words joining, disappearing or changing meaning constantly.
Fo shizzle.
It seems the more important a subject is to us, the more words we have to describe — just think money and sex. Words have the ability to exhilarate or demoralize, to exalt or diminish, to lift the spirit or to crush it. And carefully chosen words have the ability to illuminate or obfuscate — our politicians are particularly skilled at the latter.
Simply put those in power manipulate (or at least try their best to manipulate) messages. It’s a corollary to Winston Churchill’s quote: “History is written by the victors.” Are those involved in the outcome of healthcare legislation stakeholders or special interest groups? Do we taxpayers have a shared responsibility or an individual mandate? Are they garbage men or sanitation engineers? Every word has a denotation — its dictionary definition — and a connotation — the feeling it elicits. If you’re poor and a bit off kilter, you’re crazy. The same quirks in someone wealthy, makes him eccentric. It all depends on who has the power.
As children we used to hurl names at one another as fervently as a liberal activist of the birther movement at a Republican town hall meeting. Our parents consoled and reminded us to rise above it with repeated renditions of “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me.” But we all know names do hurt. Words can have profound impact.
Those two factors — words have an impact and that those who control them control their meaning — offer enormous opportunity or disaster, both for the industry and for your business.
For decades we’ve called ourselves the Green Industry. That phrase has been hijacked by extremists, and they’re getting the upper hand. We still use the term internally, but to the outside world, members of the Green Industry are increasingly thought of as those fighting for chemical free lawns. It’s not just that we’ve lost control of the phrase; it’s now being used against us.
At the local level you need to worry about who controls your message. That argument over who is the real Green Industry is being fought on national and local levels. Environmental extremists target federal, state and local legislators. Organizations like the Professional Landcare Network (PLANET), Responsible Industry for Sound Environment (RISE), and the American Nursery and Landscape Association (ANLA) do a good job fighting in Congress, but they currently don’t have enough manpower to take the fight to the street level. And the opposition is battling community by community. Too few of us are willing to stand up and confront their arguments, to go to a city council meeting and talk about the science, not the hysteria.
It doesn’t always matter whether you have right on your side. If we’re not willing to stand up and fight for our Green Industry, we might soon come to understand all to well the meaning of another list of words: broke, out of business, bankrupt, closed.
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