Oh, It's Just Spin

I might be on a roll on what I am calling “polar words.” I raised the question recently of the Oregon campaign against a measure that was “too extreme,” for instance. This is going to be one of those deals where you tentatively call an experience something and as soon as you call it something, you start having it every time you turn around.

I’m thinking of a You Tube video I saw recently called “The Power of Words.” It’s a beautiful little two minute clip of a woman who re-writes the sign of a blind beggar, resulting in a lot more people stopping by to give him money. Interestingly, she didn’t give him any money. All she did was re-write his sign. I’m sure there’s a moral there somewhere, but I’m in a hurry.

I showed this video to a friend who immediately renamed it “The Power of Spin.” Spin. Hmm. How long has it been since you heard that word used in a positively connoted way? Other than as a preparation for weaving, I mean. So “spin” is bad. We will now begin looking for “un-spun” communications.

How’s it coming?

No, it’s OK. It’s a slow MONTH. I can wait.

We could dicker a little, I suppose, about how to define spin, but I don’t see the point to it. Besides, wouldn’t you just try to spin the definition one way, while tried to spin it the other? Spin is a message that has a context or a subtext or an intention and in which the words are chosen to push any of the three either into the foreground of the message or into the background. When it word was coined, in its present context, it referred to some extreme state of message-mongering. You don’t have to tell ME about spin. I grew up during World War II when absolutely everything was marketed with the war in mind: beauty products, pens and pencils, financial instruments, motor vehicles. The subtext of nearly everything was “Win the War” or “Kill the [favorite ethnic slur here]”

Bob Newhart nailed spin in one of his monologues where he led off an account of a disaster on a submarine by saying that the most important thing to be said was that it happened on a slow news day. OK, Bob.

If I ran the world, spin would be (again) a name we use for an emphasis on the effect of a word that is wholly out of keeping with the meaning of the word. “Slow news day” is not what you want most to know about a submarine disaster. “No product is better than X” is not what you want to know about a line of products that are all equally effective. “Not as good as he hoped” is not what you want to know about a disastrous outcome of someone's project.

And if we call things like that spin, we get to have our regular old language back, where it is taken for granted that words have contexts and subtexts and intentions and that’s just fine. It is the perversion of those stable features or our language that deserves to be called spin. Now, as you might have noticed, I do not, in fact, run the world so my hopes for this proposed return to sanity are not high.