My Andrews chums were sharing their personal redefinitions
of leadership and I went on the following rant.
I have a personal resistance to rewriting our dictionaries
too flippantly. Consider how we have worn out many words for kids who don't
learn as quickly as others. "Idiot" was replaced by a kinder word
that took attention off their mental capacity and focused more on the slowness
of their learning. That word was “retarded,” which has now, by its association
with the low IQ we dread, become an insult. That word, once compassionate, is
now rude. Then came “learning disabled” then “special ed student” All those
words took on the flavor of our phobia and began to feel like insults. So for
now the word is “exceptional” which is technically true; they are the exception to whatever norms we
expect in the classroom. However, it will only cripple another word. “Bill is
an exceptional student” tells me nothing about which end of the bell curve he's
on. So you get teachers asking “Really exceptional, or the other way?”
(Whatever sense you can make of that question...)
Our problem is that we have an unexamined assumption that
having a low IQ is shameful. Therefore, every euphemism used to describe it
will become shameful by association. Then we will replace it with a new
short-lived euphemism.
I believe a similar problem plagues the word “leadership.”
Some people are uncomfortable with it because they distrust leaders (Girl Scout
research shows few young people want anything to do with formal leadership
roles, because they perceive it to be all about telling others what to do, and
who wants to be bossy? You'll lose your friends. So by extension, who wants to
be “the boss”?)
However, I think most people over 30 years old hold an
unexamined assumption that leaders are superior, so labeling one person as a
leader seems non-inclusive. It’s a put down to all the rest of us who are worth
something. So now “we are all leaders.” Dandy. We do all have influence to
varying degrees, but leadership wasn’t only about influence; it was also about
visibility and accountability to the public. It was about being able to see a
little further towards the horizon. But now that we’ve made everyone a “leader”
of one sort or another, we've had to invent longer terms to designate the
phenomenon of people in positions of authority, power, and public visibility.
We still want to study that so we need a word or more likely an awkward, gangly
phrase for it.
Incidentally, the same thing has happened to the word “hero”
I'm sure you’ve noticed. We are all “heroes” if we return somebody’s wallet, brighten
someone’s day with a smile, volunteer with a local charity, or sign a pledge
not to bully.
Maybe someday we’ll lose our fixation on intelligence and we
won’t have to conscript ill-fitted euphemisms to describe those who are not highly intelligent. “Retarded” then may
again feel like a kind term. Only our current fear and loathing make it ugly.
Just so, maybe someday we’ll actually internalize the worth
of people who are not commanding ships, boardrooms, and businesses, and we won’t
have to tell ourselves that we’re all leaders and heroes. In that great day when we
all “get” that all of us really matter, we can let the word “leader” return to
its earlier work of describing a person in a visible role of responsibility and
to whom we look for facilitating new ways around problems.
In the meantime, our shared and unchallenged phobias will
continue to sour our attempts at inclusive language. Until we truly are
inclusive (clear down to our bones), our language will repeatedly fail to be.
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