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When Language Goes

Viral
How do innocuous words become insidious in the face of a public
health emergency?

Getty/Jonathan Aprea

By: Chi Luu (https://daily.jstor.org/daily-author/chi-luu/) March 11, 2020 8 minutes

The times we live in are starting to seem disturbingly biblical. Worldwide,

there have been fires raging across continents
/
(https://daily.jstor.org/the-linguistic-anatomy-of-a-political-firestorm/),
unbearable heatwaves (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-
50817963), and unseasonably warm winters
(https://www.npr.org/2020/02/18/803125282/how-warming-winters-are-
affecting-everything). There’s been major social upheaval, too, from
strikes, protests, and elections. And now, the world suddenly finds itself in
the midst of a possible pandemic that dare not speak its name
(https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/dont-panic-the-
comprehensive-ars-technica-guide-to-the-coronavirus/?comments=1).

In a very short span of time, cases of a new coronavirus originating in

Wuhan, a city in the Chinese province of Hubei, have spread exponentially
around the globe. The virus has caused sickness and death in such
unmanageably large numbers that public health systems in some
countries, lacking resources, have been strained to the breaking point. In
the early confusion and growing public panic, as researchers raced to
investigate the makeup of this strange new virus, amid infection and
fatality rates much higher than the seasonal flu
(https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-
reports/20200306-sitrep-46-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=96b04adf_2), there
was scarcely time to worry about the seemingly tangential linguistic
implications of when to call a pandemic a pandemic
(https://www.newscientist.com/article/2235342-covid-19-why-wont-
the-who-officially-declare-a-coronavirus-pandemic/) and what we
should consider when naming a new disease.

/
As with many other recent global crises, there has been a flood of
dangerous misinformation
(https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/china-
coronavirus-twitter/605644/), and with it, the insidious “viral” spread of
toxic speech through social media. With people beginning to grapple with
fearsome unknowns over which they have little control, the public
conversation has nourished a sense of permissiveness around acts of
outright racism and physical violence
(https://time.com/5797836/coronavirus-racism-stereotypes-attacks/).
The wrong kind of name might give listeners the wrong idea.

The path between the so-called linguistic dog whistles and the violent
action they can inspire is a murky one. How do words that should be
innocuous, like “poor,” “welfare,” or “inner city,” or perhaps more
topical words, like “socialist,” “illegals,” and “establishment,” go negative?

While these names may have been used

neutrally at rst, it became clear that they
had the potential to reinforce harmful
stereotypes.

By February 11, when the World Health Organization gave the name
COVID-19 to the mystery disease
(https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-
2019/technical-guidance/naming-the-coronavirus-disease-(covid-
2019)-and-the-virus-that-causes-it), it was perhaps too late. A range of
colloquial labels had already taken root. Since there’s more than one kind
of coronavirus, people came up with intuitive names that referenced the
/
disease’s origins, such as the “China flu” or “Wuhan virus.” While these
names may have been used neutrally at first, it became clear that they had
the potential to reinforce harmful stereotypes. As a disease name, COVID-
19 is easy to pronounce and also follows the WHO convention of not
referencing animals, people, or places, to avoid stigmatizing them. (The
WHO’s now-official name for the virus is severe acute respiratory
syndrome coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2; the disease that the virus causes
is coronavirus disease, or COVID-19.)

Still, the association of COVID-19 with China and Asian people in general
has lingered. Chinese-owned businesses far from any outbreak felt the
pinch, with their customers staying away, and many Asian people are
reporting a rise in racism
(https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/20/us/coronavirus-racist-attacks-
against-asian-americans/index.html). It’s clear that in the right context,
there’s a hidden power associated with a name, despite what Shakespeare
might say. Taiwan, in a tussle over nationhood with China, was
controversially labeled by the WHO at times as “Taiwan, China,” or
“Taipei” in its outbreak updates (https://qz.com/1798157/who-
coronavirus-report-mislabels-taiwan/). Taiwan decided to continue
using the earlier term “Wuhan virus”
(https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3875140) widely, ostensibly
to avoid confusing the public with too many names. But perhaps there
was another reason for not using a naming convention that most other
countries quickly adopted.

How does a name that perhaps arose out of expediency develop negative
connotations for a wider English-speaking audience?
/
Being associated with illness, much less a pandemic-causing virus, is not
the most positive of things. As Lawrence Besserman notes, being ill in the
English language is no fun . Metaphorically, illness is often
conceptualized as a personal failing, as we blame the sick for actively
catching illnesses rather than having illness happen to them. Although “ill”
is not etymologically related to “evil”, Besserman shows how the two
became synonymous, as “ill” attracted more negative metaphorical
connotations of moral depravity, just as “sick” similarly took on the
pejorative senses of being mentally ill or even “perverted.” These senses
remain in terms like ill-advised, ill-bred, ill-tempered, ill-will.

But more than that, as the recent incidents of coronavirus-related racism

show, many countries, in particular the U.S., have a long and unhealthy
history of associating germs with the idea of being foreign . The long-
held stereotype of unclean immigrants importing germs from strange
places resulted in invasive public health practices before immigrants were
allowed to enter the country, with many being deported for spurious
health reasons. Disease was seen as related to criminality, poverty,
addiction, immoral behavior, even communism. Those same germs, of
course, don’t particularly care for borders; they could have just as easily
hopped on an unsuspecting American coming back from a vacation
abroad.

It’s unsurprising, then, that the name of a disease, if it incorporates the

name of a people, will likely eventually result in stigmatization, especially
given the gravity of the current outbreaks. So much so that Chinese
officials are reportedly trying to push the false story that COVID-19

/
may have been found in China, but didn’t originate there
(https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/coronavirus-rumors-
misinformation-swirl-unchecked-china-n1151291).

In today’s heavily charged political environments, more and more people

are aware that language can be weaponized and used to frame narratives
that aim to persuade people one way or another
(https://daily.jstor.org/are-we-being-framed/). But when we think of
weaponized language, often it’s a pretty blunt instrument. We tend to
focus on the obvious slurs that a speaker and a wider audience can
understand are clear-cut negative terms that convey bigoted intentions
and aim to wound.

Perhaps a more harmful kind of speech lives

in a gray area, merging and intertwining with
norms and nudging them in certain
directions.

We live in a world where it’s much harder to use outright slurs as linguistic
weapons in a public or professional sphere, because racism is widely seen
as unacceptable, and calling someone a racist is still considered a serious
accusation for which there’d better be evidence. When slurs are used, it’s
easier for observers to call out racism with certainty, and harder for those
who use slurs to plausibly deny it.

Perhaps a more harmful kind of speech lives in a gray area, merging and
intertwining with norms and nudging them in certain directions, but
having plausible deniability when confronted. Right-wing Dutch politician
/
Geert Wilders once staged a scene where he asked a crowd “Do you want
more or fewer Moroccans?” which resulted in anti-Moroccan chants
from the audience. After being convicted of hate speech, he denied it,
plausibly, saying, “I cannot believe it, but I have been convicted because I
asked a question about Moroccans…. The Netherlands have become a sick
country.”

It can be hard to tell when speech is intentionally coded to get listeners to

infer something that’s never directly said—and when it’s really what it
says on the surface. Last year, when Joe Biden, a presidential candidate
known for his support of African-American communities, said “poor kids
are just as bright and just as talented as white kids
(https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/us/politics/joe-biden-poor-
kids.html),” what did he mean? Perhaps it was a gaffe, or perhaps it was
an unwitting code that drew on assumptions that some of his listeners
shared. Unlike a slur, it’s hard to tell what his intentions were. Crucially,
though, intent matters less than whether an audience can still understand
and receive the message as coded, and in some cases, act on it.

When Barack Obama suggested during the 2008 presidential campaign

that his opponent, John McCain, and the Republican Party would push the
fact that he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar
bills ,” McCain’s campaign responded furiously: “We are not going to let
anybody paint John McCain, who has fought his entire life for equal rights
for everyone, [sic] to be able to be painted as racist.” How did McCain’s
campaign read fighting words into Obama’s statement? For those who are
looking and are of a similar mindset, the answer is obvious, but for others,

/
it might not be. This is why these political code words are often called dog
whistles: those who are sensitive to it can hear it, but those who aren’t,
can’t.

This gray language can spread across a community and infect the
semantics of words with a new toxicity, if listeners can make the
metaphorical connections and choose to endorse them by not challenging
them. The more they’re repeated in those fuzzy-but-negative contexts,
the more these coded meanings become normalized and accepted. But
for philosopher Lynne Tirrell, words don’t go negative just through
frequency of use in a negative context. Conversation is a joint, cooperative
activity, like a dance, with actions and reactions. It needs listeners to react,
by accepting or resisting what’s said. For toxic speech to evolve new
inferences and meanings, rather than challenging or resisting the
semantic change, an audience has to endorse it by taking it up and using it
themselves, spreading it among the community like a virus that leaps from
host to host. It’s in this way that media can unwittingly spread biased
political talking points, by dutifully reporting toxic speech without
commentary or challenging false information in a distorted sense of
neutrality.

Tirrell considers the idea of an epidemiology of toxic language ,

conceptualizing language as something that can have the power to cause
harm, by degrees, just like a poison or a disease. When we think of speech
acts in terms of toxins or viruses, it’s a useful medical metaphor that helps
us makes sense of how speech, even when it doesn’t contain any slurs,

/
name calling, hate speech, or other derogatory language, can nevertheless
be harmful, even to the point of violence, especially the further and more
frequently it’s spread around.

“Words have killed my country,” says Dr. Naasson Munyandamutsa, a

Rwandan psychiatrist who survived genocide. Tirrell describes how
Munyandamutsa was referring to the derogatory words that were once
used to refer to Tutsi guerrilla soldiers, words like inzoka (snake) and
inyenzi (cockroach). It was the same kind of language that once was used
jokingly, perhaps as a playful threat to kill Tutsi friends, even as they all
socialized or worked together. In a mere four years, their toxic effect
changed drastically and spread across the country like a virus, to refer to
the entire Tutsi community. Not just nasty names, these words primed
some Rwandan citizens to take action and kill those who were once their
neighbors.

As Tirrell points out, when Donald Trump says “Syrian refugees are
snakes,” he is likewise drawing on suggestive qualities about snakes that
allow his listeners to infer certain negative ideas about an entire people,
and by extension, other immigrants and refugees. Tirrell quotes
Republican consultant Frank Luntz as saying that Trump initially left
people “horrified by his offensive statements. But as time went on, they
came to enjoy and absorb it.” As Tirrell elaborates, “Each repetition of an
outrageous speech act makes the next one less of a surprise, until such
speech becomes common enough to seem ‘normal,’ lowering the
standard of acceptability.”

/
Toxic speech, under the insidious guise of ordinary language, can act as a
virus if spread to the right crowd. It can be just as harmful as outright
slurs, no longer the words we once knew.

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Resources
JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR
Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free
on JSTOR.

Toxic Speech: Toward an Epidemiology of Discursive Harm

(https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26529441?mag=when-language-
goes-viral)
By: Lynne Tirrell
Philosophical Topics, Vol. 45, No. 2 No. 2, Philosophy of Language (FALL
2017), pp. 139-162
University of Arkansas Press

Being Sick in English: Notes on the Semantics of Illness

(https://www jstor org/stable/455730?mag=when-language-goes-viral) /
(https://www.jstor.org/stable/455730?mag=when language goes viral)
By: Lawrence Besserman
American Speech, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Winter, 1989), pp. 368-372
Duke University Press

The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigrants

and Disease in American Society
(https://www.jstor.org/stable/3350445?mag=when-language-goes-viral)
By: Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern
The Milbank Quarterly, Vol. 80, No. 4 (2002), pp. 757-788
Wiley on behalf of Milbank Memorial Fund

Code Words in Political Discourse

(https://www.jstor.org/stable/26529437?mag=when-language-goes-
viral)
By: Justin Khoo
Philosophical Topics, Vol. 45, No. 2, Philosophy of Language (FALL 2017),
pp. 33-64
University of Arkansas Press

That Which We Call Welfare by Any Other Name Would Smell Sweeter
an Analysis of the Impact of Question Wording on Response Patterns
(https://www.jstor.org/stable/2749059?mag=when-language-goes-
viral)
By: Tom W. Smith
The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Spring, 1987), pp. 75-83
Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public
Opinion Research

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