What is said in the name of Safety
Last night I was doing the NYT crossword when I came across this great piece from Sam Corbin;
I often hear people talking about how a given slang word is “breaking containment.” By this, they’re usually describing the spread of a community-specific term into mainstream usage. Consider “props,” from African-American Vernacular English; “slay,” from the ballroom scene; and “farming,” from gamer culture. Breaking containment calls up metaphorical imagery of various and often science-fiction-grade scenarios: the alien escaping its examination chamber, the lethal biochemical leaked from a lab, or a hardened killer digging his way out of the penitentiary. And with any such danger, there’s a dash either to recontain it or to destroy it altogether. What’s interesting about language is that it doesn’t become more dangerous after escaping containment. In fact, it’s considered all but neutralized — made meaningless by overuse.
If you’ve ever watched a word or a phrase make its way from novel to null, you know what I’m talking about. One day, “bed rotting” is the perfect way to describe your self-care regimen; the next, it’s a marketing term for a granola bar company. (Erica Brozovsky, a sociolinguist, says it best: “When brands on social media use a slang word in their marketing, that basically guarantees it’s ‘over.’”) The potency of therapy terms like “setting boundaries” or avoiding “toxic personalities” has waned because of how often the terms have been co-opted to excuse selfish or lazy behavior. If there is a useful metaphor for this lexical leakage, it’s not contagion or alien invasion. It’s more like dilution — adding too much water to your soup, say.
It’s no surprise that slang loses its cultural currency — in scientific terms, its “covert prestige” — among original users once it moves into widespread use. A phrase like “It’s giving [X]” hardly shows class solidarity when Starbucks can use it to sell you coffee. That may be the negative effect we’re signaling when we characterize language change in epidemiological terms: memes going “viral”; new slang “catching” or “spreading”; a once-useful term breaking containment and losing all of its strength in the blink of an eye.
We can’t stop a word from escaping its original context, but we can rest easy knowing that another one will always spawn in its place. That’s the wonderful thing about our infectious, uncontainable language: It’s alive.
What wonderful observations!
In Safety we come up with jingoistic words, phrases and slogans like,
- Zero Harm
- Safety First
- Pre-accident Investigations
- Safety rules are a Pain
There are a multitude! But what I want to know is what safety slogan, meme, phrase do you find has become senseless because of its overuse.
Matt Thorne
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And the ongoing argument, if you have the ‘balance’ right. Nothing to do with people, just the numbers.
Safety is a choice you make.
All accidents are preventable
Safety first
And isn’t this always seen as a senior management cop out!
Leading and lagging indicators
And the ongoing argument, if you have the ‘balance’ right. Nothing to do with people, just the numbers.