Over the past few years of writing my weekly blogs for Dutchbuzz, I have paid special attention to using positive wording and phrasing. You’ll find very few ‘terribles’ ‘disgustings’ ‘degenerates’ or curses in my blogs and hardly any ‘no’s, ‘not’s’ or don’t’s. To me they are red flags. I firmly believe our senses work like computers in the way that they are programmed by the use of words. Negative wording has the tendency to make us feel guilty or insecure, take us off guard or angry when we’re smart and can see right through what people are trying to lie to us
The advertising world long discovered how the right choice of words combined with spell binding images create potential customers who do exactly what advertisers want: buy the product. In fact consumers are programmed to such an extend that only few notice how they are being molded into place. In that sense positive wording can be used to mislead people. It takes surprisingly little to convince people in advertising.di
‘Chosen as best butcher of 2018″ for instance will make many think this must be a good butcher and go there to shop. Yet ‘best butcher’ of what? Chosen by who? By the same clients who go there because he’s the best butcher? The manner in which something is described has the potential to make us jump up from our couches and follow the Pied Piper of Hamelin; even when in real life the holiday resort turns out to be next door to a troubled neighborhood with lots of poverty.
‘Nice people drink fizzy fizzz’. You like thinking of yourself as a nice person; so fizzy fizz fits you. We buy clothes, cars, houses because we want to identify ourselves with the people who buy that kind of thing. ‘What’s in a Name’ Shakespeare would ask;
That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet;
On a different angle the way we use our own language in daily life is of big influence of the outcome. When I am accustomed to thinking negatively about prospect events, I find they do indeed often turn out negative. Do I approach my chances in life in a positive manner however and use positive visualization and wording, whatever it is I am thinking of has already become better before it even started. The quantum effect of positive thinking.
The way we use language reveals very much about how we think hence who we are. I’m sure you can think of your own examples here of people around you. People who call each others names; in that process forgetting that what they call the other tells more about who they are, then about the person they call names.
The card to go with this is the 3 of Insights, ‘Self Fulfilling Prophesy.
In this context; ‘3’ stands for our ability to be creative in the way we use language and apply it, so they will influence the outcomes (without being attached to the outcome)
‘Insights’ are the finds we make along the way on the path of life; in this case the learning curves of language
To read more click the card.
I wish you a mindful language day
Ingrid
The abridged spoken version of this spoken blog, features as end note on ‘Dutchbuzz’, the radio hour for Internationals every Tuesday from 10 to 11 pm on ‘Den Haag FM’ and can be found in the Programme Archive of the Dutchbuzz podcasts, dated January 22 , 2019 or click the link below
