Language is a funny thing, often complicated. It’s just never as simple as calling ‘a spade a spade’. With the best will in the world it’s not as easy to say what you mean as it is to mean what you say.
Why? Because words are slippery little fuckers. They’re what’s known as polysemous, this means that words have many senses and multiple meanings. From the moment the originate in language and start being used in everyday life words pick up associated meanings each and every time they’re used.
We may not always notice but in order to communicate with one another we employ words which say so much more than what they actually mean because of the connotations they’ve gained throughout centuries of use.
We also live by metaphors as a means of fully expressing what’s going on in our minds. We need words to make images so that those we speak to can see what we're saying in their mind's eye. Arguments are battles to be won. Life is journey, love Is war, time is money. These are figurative comparisons, combinations of words which come together to equal more than the sum of their parts and help the listener to understand the words the speaker is saying in terms of each other.
It’s a metaphor which got one of the Labour leadership candidates into rather hot water this week. Party leader hopeful and former Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, Owen Smith has been forced to apologise after saying he wishes Labour had the strength to ‘smash’ the Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May, ‘back on her heels’.
Smith, quite rightly, has come under fire and faced a backlash for his use of a metaphor just like the ones I’m using right here in this very sentence. The problem with Smith’s use of language, however, is this: it has incredibly serious implications.
As the Women’s Equality Party leader, Sophie Walker has pointed out Smith’s choice of words signified both ‘sexist’ and ‘violent’ meanings.
To ‘smash’ something or someone is to violently break it into pieces. It’s a verb. You smash a window or a plate to smithereens in a moment of rage with great force. You ‘smash’ into someone with your car or your fist. ‘Smashing’ is intentional or deliberate. It’s also a noun. You hear a smash, loud and clear.
‘Knocking someone back on their heels’ is both a metaphor and an idiom. It’s an expression, one so established that everyone knows what it means. Knocking is noisy, it attracts attention. If you ‘knock’ someone ‘back on their heels’ you catch them off guard, there’s an element of surprise and shock. The image conjured is one of someone being thrown off balance with force, the sort of force that might follow after they’re been smashed into. Unlike being on the balls of your feet, as you might be when running away from danger. If you’ve been knocked back on your heels you’re immobile, particularly if you’re a woman wearing stilettoes.
All of that meaning from just five little words.
Smith may or may not have been aware of what he was saying. That’s beside the point. He should have thought more carefully about the underlying meaning of what he was saying, of the power of the figure of speech he was invoking and questioned why he was choosing to use such a turn of phrase.
Words mean so much more than they appear to at first glance, they never underperform. They do so much more than they say on the tin.
A spokesperson for Owen Smith told The Debrief ‘it was off script and, on reflection, it was an inappropriate choice of phrase and he apologises for using it.’
Most sexist and racist language arises from the fact that words, over time, have been imbued with meaning. They come to embody particular points of views. They’ve absorbed the values of the people who’ve uttered them and the societies within which they’ve been used. Misuses of language are common, they are always revealing about the principles and beliefs of the person speaking whether they are conscious of this or not. Words are products of us, we shape them.
A blunder such as Smith’s is common, borne out of the presumption that everyone is male, like him. If he had been speaking about a male opponent would his language be quite so shocking? If there were more women in politics perhaps such violent language wouldn’t be so permissible?
On script, or off such a remark was worse than careless. It was sexist. Pull your socks up, Owen.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.