Manipulation and Deception in Language

Language

Deliberately deceptive language manipulates the audience. This is as true for the use of propaganda for nefarious political purposes, such as voter manipulation, as it is for good old-fashioned maintenance of prejudices via the proliferation of stereotypes. Advertising is replete with manipulative language constructed to sell products and services. Language can be used to distract, impress, persuade, and achieve goals other than the direct communication of thoughts and ideas. Specific techniques such as vicious abstraction, weasel words, and suppressed quantification used to manipulate and deceive for the purposes of social control.

Some specific techniques of manipulative language are used so often, that they seem like a natural part of human discourse. Becoming aware of deceptive language can be summarily difficult. Suppressed quantification is one deliberately deceptive use of language that is common enough in everyday discourse that it can go unnoticed. As Harris (2000) points out, "Suppressed quantification occurs quite commonly in everyday discourse, largely because it has become an ingrained habit of sloppy thinking, and partly because some people like to use it to deceive." Suppressed quantification is a form of overgeneralization and avoidance of clarification of terms. Harris (2000) uses the example: "People are opposed to eating hamburgers without pickles" to illustrate the phenomenon. The term "people" is deliberately vague. The statement about hamburgers and pickles might seem harmless enough, but suppressed quantification is often used in journalistic writing to suggest a phenomenon is more or less common than it actually is. Therefore, suppressed quantification can be classified as deceptive language used to manipulate the mind of the public.

Schrank (n.d.) points out the prevalence of some types of manipulative language in advertising. One type of manipulative language used commonly in the advertising world is the "water is wet" claim. To illustrate the "water is wet" notion, Schrank (n.d.) uses the example, "Mobil: the Detergent Gasoline." The tagline is fine, but for the fact that "any gasoline acts as a cleaning agent," (Schrank, n.d.). The consumer is led to believe that Mobil is the only gasoline to be a "detergent," but an educated consumer knows this is not the case. The problem is that many consumers are poorly educated; not just about the products they consume, but also the language used to deceive them into making purchases. That previous sentence, of course, used suppressed quantification to prove a point. Weasel words are also commonly used to deceive. The weasel words add qualifiers to statements that would otherwise be blatantly false. In advertising, deceptive language manipulates consumers into buying products under false pretenses or buying products that are unnecessary.