Words

Turn on a TV news channel in the US and you are likely to see some well-spoken, attractive personality referring to opponents of the Iraq war as members of the ‘hard left’. A large fraction of the American public opposes the war, of course, but we are inured to this prejudicial use of language. At least one network speaks quite purposefully, but one wonders about the others — are the announcers themselves, along with the rest of us, being manipulated by their own words? Scientists think of themselves as being in control of the words they use rather than the other way around. Nietzsche’s comment above might give us pause. I have discussed in a previous communiqué unwitting problems engendered by toofacile use of the scientific term ‘epigenetic’ [1]. Here my concern is with four rather ordinary words — ‘activation’, ‘cooperativity’, ‘recruitment’ and ‘regulation’. We have gotten so used to using these words in one context — thereby engraining our ‘prejudices’ — that we can be fooled when they are used in another. In the context I will emphasize, these words are interrelated, and understanding one requires understanding all.