Memphis in all the big media headlines this week took our community by surprise reporting the historic flood of 2011 and showing the absolute worst pictures and images of a flood that has impacted just 1% of our City. Now I will say right here that this post is not meant to be insensitve to those who are affected. I am writing this from a public relations perspective and from my own personal observations and experience dealing with media and crisis management. I think we (our whole community) underestimated the power of the national media and their ability to portray things differently than they happened.
perceptions
Of letter bombs and skull tweets
Sticks and stones can break our bones, but words will never hurt us? Bah. Every playground-dwelling kid in the world has shown that phrase the lie. In fact, it amazes me that we aren’t more wary of the idiomatic anthrax that wages alchemical warfare inside us every day.
As any self-help guru worth his weight in jacuzzis will tell you, the words we think and speak determine our moods, our perceptions and ultimately our lives. Tony Robbins – he of the iconic nineties whoop-yeah Bible ‘Awaken the Giant Within’ – may be relentlessly American, embarrassingly self-promoting and an outrageous coiner of Copyrighted Jargonese™, but he’s pretty damn good on what he calls Transformational Vocabulary (™, natch).
The idea is that we’re all infested with thousands of tiny linguistic burrs which lodge in our psychological schemas and profoundly colour our view of the world – often in shades of sludgy, depressive grey. The habitual words and metaphors we use to describe our selves, experiences and emotions inevitably limit and ultimately shape those selves, experiences and emotions. If you’re feeling ‘over-burdened’ as you ‘plough away’ at work before you ‘get slaughtered’ at weekends, no wonder that your day has a submissively miserable farmyard pall.
It was Rory Kinnear who reminded me of transformational language this week. No, sadly not over a chummy brandy and ginger backstage at the National; I simply saw his Hamlet, which is a masterclass in performative vocabulary. Every word is obsessively, precisely coined: immaculately chosen, bitterly revelled in, each speech visibly poisoning his skittish, scatting body syllable by syllable.
For Hamlet is the master of self-torture through articulacy, the prince of destructive NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). He talks himself into tragedy. The sheer inventiveness and sensual impact of his rhetoric makes his nightmare state of Denmark so real that it transubstantiates from word to matter. His metaphors of death, decay and danger are so relentless that they actually materialise.