What are the ethics of everyday language?

When we think about ethical language, what mostly leaps to mind are examples of corporate or political spin.

Spectacular as these might be, they often affect our lives far less directly than the everyday public language we encounter at work, in the supermarket, or at our local school.

Take something as simple as the family holiday.

Picture an average mum, dad and kids heading off to Tasmania on the new ferry service. They turn up at the quay to find their ship isn’t there. So mum starts to read the fine print on the conditions of carriage, and it sounds like this: “The TT-Line reserves the right at any time to substitute one vessel for another to abandon or alter any voyage either before the commencement or at any time during the course thereof to dispatch the vessel before” And this is only the first part of a 250-word, virtually unpunctuated sentence, which in turn rambles on for more than five and a half very dense pages.

Standing dockside with baggage in hand, our family is confronting the language of law. They have plenty of time to decipher the code, as their boat had in fact ‘dispatched’ before the advertised ‘commencement’. They think the text boils down to ‘Well, you’ve got a ticket, but we don’t actually have to take you anywhere’.

Now the lawyer who wrote this text would argue that said language is necessary to be legally precise. In a dispute, a judge fully invested in that code would know exactly what it meant, and that will keep the company safe from litigation.

And this is where we find our ethical problem: this text wasn’t written for our family, nor for anyone else boarding the Spirit of Tasmania. It was written to protect the interests of one party at the expense of another.

An equal conversation

If our public language is to be ethical, it needs to provide for a more equal participation in every transaction, whether in the mechanics workshop or at the local shop, at the insurance office or in the doctor’s office. Too often, the language deliberately turns what should be a conversation into a monologue.

So how can we maximise the chances of more equal conversations in our daily commerce? I want to suggest two simple rules for a more ethical language of public exchange:

1.    Say what you mean.

2.    Mean what you say.