How Words Get Their Meaning, and How That Influences Your Thinking.

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There have been a lot of underlying themes in my Words MADDER videos that I thought I should dedicate a video to covering directly. My goal with this series is to help people gain more control over their own "programming" and gain awareness of how language affects their thinking. Most of all, I want people to understand how easy it is for those who have power in society to use language to manipulate their perceptions and behavior. These concepts are at the core of this series.

While I do have a little fun sticking my tongue out at academia, I do want to make it clear that I am definitely providing a hyper-simplistic overview of all these concepts. I do this because there is no point in these ideas if they don't ultimately contribute, and are accessible, to society as a whole. I want to present them in a way everyone can use and validate for themselves. If you are intrigued, I encourage you to dive in a learn more.

00:00 Introduction - Taking Words for Granted
01:59 How Our Brains Define Words
09:38 How Language Lives in the Subconscious Mind
16:40 How Language Works Differently for Different People
18:32 How Language is Used to Manipulate You
31:07 You Should Get MADDER About Words

The image in the video of the man holding slimy puppet strings is from my daughter's music video for "Feed the Machine" which you see here:

Here are links to learn more about the concepts I mention in the video:
Prototype Theory:



Language Network Theory




Accommodation Theory




Thought Terminating Cliches


Negative Framing
(psychology)


Semantic Degradation (More commonly known as "Semantic Drift")


Great Book on Mind Control Through Language:


Finally, I want to say that a lot of my work is inspired, at least in part, by George Carlin. It is a pity that intellectuals can be so snooty, that they can't recognize true insight if it doesn't come from a research paper or pretentious manuscript. Even though he called himself a comedian, George Carlin was true pioneer in hidden meanings and manipulations of language and rhetoric. I encourage everyone to watch his work, but my favorite is his routine on "soft language" which is related to what I presented on "Emotional Sterilization."

George Carlin on Soft Language:


As always, after doing a video I think of things that would have helped for clarification. Here are a couple more points:

- Because of the incredible influence of social acceptance on language, the feelings we often end up defining words with are the feelings of those around us have rather than our own.
- Language manipulators know they can get more approval of an idea by using words they know are positively reacted to by a group of people to describe it. For example, I can describe an economic plan (like using public parks to increase property values in a community) as "strategic capiltalism" to conservatives while calling it "value-based socialism" to liberals, and be describing the exact same thing.