The choice of words is important, it “makes the music”. Unsurprisingly for me, as a book author and wordsmith, I naturally pay a lot of attention to the right words and phrases. Especially because of the way they can change mindsets and subsequently drive or prevent innovation. I myself have written two books dedicated purely to the choice of words, Sorry Not Sorry: The Art of the Non-Apology and Killer Phrases for Beginners. We can also observe the heated discussions about gendering on a daily basis, on which, incidentally, I also have a book in preparation.
But the important thing in my daily work as a speaker and host of delegations in Silicon Valley is to listen carefully when choosing the words for the new ideas and technology trends that the visitors say here. So I always bring an ugly stuffed animal to give to the person who says something negative.
For an article entitled Is the west talking itself into decline?, the Financial Times conducted an analysis of word choice in English, French and German language books, examining how the balance in the choice between optimistic and cautious terms has shifted over the last two centuries.
The researchers of a study published a month ago, entitled Enlightenment Ideals and Belief in Progress in the Run-up to the Industrial Revolution: A Textual Analysis, analyzed the content of 173,031 books published in England between 1500 and 1900, and counted the frequency of use of words with negative and positive connotations.
As can be seen in the graph, the number of optimistic words increased from 1700 onwards, while the number of pessimistic ones fell slightly. The Financial Times journalist John Burn-Murdoch first added Spanish, then French and German books to the analysis. Since the 1960s in particular, the frequency of terms relating to progress, improvement and the future has fallen by around 25 percent, while terms relating to threats, risks and worries have become many times more common.
He quotes Ruxandra Teslo, one of a growing community of progress-oriented writers at the intersection of science, economics and politics, who argues that the growing skepticism about technology and the increasing zero-sum thinking in modern society is one of the key ideological challenges of our time.
Incidentally, this confirms my own feeling of a negative spin in German-language non-fiction literature on technology topics. As someone who has lived in Silicon Valley since 2001, I refused to read non-fiction by German authors for many years. Only since I started writing non-fiction books for a German-speaking audience on technology trends and Silicon Valley itself have I started reading non-fiction books by German authors again, alongside the English-language non-fiction books by admittedly many techno-optimistic authors. However, it’s not so much to learn something new about the topic itself, but to get to know the negative prejudices and sometimes overly cautious arguments in them. I can also tell quite quickly whether the author lives in Germany or is a German speaker abroad. The latter have a much broader and in many cases positive view of things.
Language is important, especially in times when we are facing more challenges than ever before due to our increasingly complex societies. A language with which we no longer express optimism brings us a world in which we no longer want to live. We need more courage to be optimistic, and that starts with our choice of words.