Fernando Gros

Re– Words

Frank Luntz is a polit­ical ana­lyst, spin-doctor and famil­iar face to anyone who watches the circus that is FoxNews. Of the talk­ing heads that bob up on Fox’s nightly merry-go-round, Luntz (along with Kirsten Powers) is the most com­pel­ling. Partly because of his exper­i­ence as a polit­ical insider, but mostly because he relies on research. In par­tic­u­lar, Luntz con­ducts focus-group research of the kind nor­mally used by mar­keters, to test not just the appeal of can­did­ates, but also dis­crete group responses to the lan­guage politi­cians use.

Insights from this kind of study together with the con­crete real­it­ies of the US polit­ical pro­cess are the stuff of Words That Work; Luntz’s enter­tain­ing, inform­at­ive and slightly biased look at lan­guage in polit­ical and public dis­course. It’s a book I highly recom­mend, not just to stu­dents of polit­ics, but to anyone whose call­ing it is to use words pub­licly. If you are speak­ing from a pulpit, or address­ing stu­dents, or put­ting words on a power­point slide this is a book you should read.

In the final chapter, Luntz offers up some words that could have real stay­ing power over the next decade — words that work in terms of com­mu­nic­at­ing ideas, cut­ting through sus­pi­cion and build­ing trust with audi­ences, cus­tom­ers and voters. One par­tic­u­lar sug­ges­tion stood out for me in the con­text of emer­ging church dis­cus­sions; the use of words begin­ning with re-,

“…The so-called “re” words… are incred­ibly power­ful because they take the best ele­ments or ideas from the past and apply them to the present and the future.”

Luntz singles out words like renew, revital­ise, reju­ven­ate, restore, rekindle as vehicles for taking some­thing that is old, tired or stale and giving it new pas­sion and polish.

“The “re” words imply action, move­ment, pro­gress, and improve­ment — all the essen­tial attrib­utes in the twenty-first-century economy.”

Of course, “re” words are per­fect for our con­sumer soci­ety of con­stant rein­ven­tion and makeover. They speak to our sus­tained adoles­cence as many of use, des­pite being well into mid-life, still stub­bornly refuse to accept the real­isa­tion that this is, in fact, all there is.

“As in cor­por­ate com­mu­nic­a­tions, the “re” words should be applied to polit­ics as well. Better to have pro­grams and policies groun­ded in tra­di­tion and exper­i­ence, than launch some­thing that’s brand-new…
… The most effect­ive way of saying “new and improved” from a polit­ical stand­point is to employ one of the “re” words.”

All of which leaves us with a troub­ling dual­ity. On the one it’s hard and pos­sibly unwise, to avoid deep cyn­icism when it comes to “re” words. New and improved — same as the old and unim­proved. We’ve all been fed enough spin and hype in our lives to see that coming. But, there’s also a real value is accept­ing that some tra­di­tions still carry power; that some­times it’s worth breath­ing new life into old ideas.

Within the world of Chris­tian speak­ing and pub­lish­ing there has already been an ava­lanche of people lean­ing heav­ily into the “re” words and I sus­pect there is yet more to come. Hope­fully we can think clearly about what this kind of lan­guage really means and be sens­it­ive to the how over­use of “re” words might lead to intel­lec­tual burnout.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 9:02 pm. It is filed under Book Reviews, Marketing, Theology and Culture, Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.