Therapeutic vocabulary in everyday life

In some twenty years, a series of technical terms has passed from consulting rooms and specialist journals into everyday conversation, social media and press headlines. The movement is documented by linguists, who track how often these words appear in the available corpora.

The migration is almost always accompanied by a broadening of meaning. A term designating a precise category comes to designate a widespread experience, and the older word it replaces drops out of use.

It would be unfair to see in this only a degradation. Having a word makes an experience nameable, and therefore shareable, and therefore collectively discussable. Several situations long considered private matters reached public space by that route, and that produced concrete effects.

The mechanism is the one described by anthropology under the name of hypocognised states: what a language does not name is harder to recognise and to handle. Naming is a social operation before it is an individual one.

A term that designates everything no longer designates anything. When the same word serves for a passing annoyance and for a serious situation, it becomes impossible to distinguish the two in a conversation, and the people concerned by the second lose the means of saying it.

Added to this is a shift of register: describing a relational difficulty in clinical vocabulary places it outside discussion. One can discuss a disagreement, not a diagnosis, and the person so designated has no way out but to contest the label itself.

The same slippage threatens instruments circulated to the general public. Using the vocabulary of disorder, announcing a level, suggesting that a result calls for correction: each of these operations turns a description into a verdict, without any data authorising it.

That is why a serious profile describes positions on axes whose two ends both have their uses, produces no global score, and uses no clinical vocabulary. It is not legal caution, it is what the data allow us to say.

A simple rule allows sorting: does the word describe what happened, or does it classify the person? Saying that a conversation was hurtful describes an episode. Saying that someone is toxic classifies them, and the classification bears on the whole of what they are.

This distinction protects against nothing and settles no conflict. It only keeps the conversation on ground where something can still be discussed.