Sheldon Rampton of CMD (Center for Media and Democracy) emphasizes how the negative connotations associated with sewage sludge prevented its proper disposal. Sludge, typically a solid matter, is produced by water and sewage treatment. In an attempt to dispose of the sludge, sewage has been dumped into oceans, resulting in serious ramifications. Authorities have since then attempted to use sludge as a fertilizer for crops. However, to their dismay, farmers were less than excited to cover their crops in a healthy layer of sewage sludge. In this particular situation, the issue was not in the material of the sludge, but the meaning that accompanied the word.
“In this era of exploding media technologies, there is no truth except the truth you create yourself,” stated Richard Edelman at Edelman World Wide. This suggests that any object or idea can be given a symbolic label.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4XT-l-_3y0)
This is directly related to the idea in Understanding Human Communications. The book reads, “Meaning is not in words themselves but rather in the way people understand them” (Sevigny, Rodman, Adler 85).
A word absorbs connotations that people associate with it over time. For example, the word mankind once represented the entire human race. Through changing times, the term mankind is now seen as politically incorrect and sexist, and the word "humanity" should be used in it's place. Similarly, the word “sludge” is associated with an unpleasant, disgusting form of waste and the thought of fertilizing crops with it is revolting. Meanwhile, animal fecal matter is used to do the same thing.
People of the Water Environment Federation created a “Name Change Task Force” in charge of determining a swift and orderly name change. Their hope was to burry the negative connotations associated with “sludge” and replace them with the freshly welded word, "biosolid".
Eventually, with enough use by the Water Treatment Industry, the word “biosolid” was printed in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as planned. “I’m pleased that the term "sludge" will not appear in the definition of biosolids. In waste water industry it is not politically correct to use the term sludge any longer” stated Pete Machro, National Biosolids Partnership. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/biosolid
However, a word is not part of language until it is accepted and associated with a meaning by a mainstream group. For the word "biosolid", this didn’t occur until 2002, twelve years after "biosolid" was published in a dictionary. The majority of biosolids were finally being applied to agricultural lands that had refused to be fertilized by sludge twelve years prior.
This illustrates the power of interpretation that people put into words and language. People can be controlled by manipulating the way by which they view certain words. This is a powerful tool that can, and often has been misused. This is but one of the multiple examples that Sheldon Rampton uncovers many similar stories through CMD. Below is Sheldon Rampton’s blog and the presentation where he speaks about the introduction of biosolids.
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