Jack Shafer remains willfully obtuse about linguistics in his review of “Unspeak” by british journalist Stephen Poole.
He says:
Unlike George Lakoff, who lectures the Democratic Party about the importance of “framing” political debates in order to win them, Poole dismisses this tactic as fighting unspeak with unspeak, as the “pro-choice” and “pro-life” schools demonstrate.
As Shafer’s past references have done, this entirely misses the point.
Lakoff doesn’t claim we “frame” our political debates. He claims we use frames to conceptualize the world and communicate our concepts. His political work is mostly concerned with discovering what political language reveals about the frames used during political debate.
Lakoff’s books treat the subject more closely. But his claims aren’t that we should use “pro-choice” to combat “pro-life”, but that we must recognize which frames are in play during a debate and use the proper words to activate those frames favoring our side.
Declaring something “unspeak” vs “natural language”won’t change the debate any. We will merely be using different words to activate same or similar frames.
(EDIT:In comments below Stephen Poole says he never made claims about “natural language”, so attribute this distinction to Shafer)
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“that we must recognize which frames are in play during a debate and use the proper words to activate those frames favoring our side”
Um, in other words, that “we” must choose vocabulary so as to frame the debate to “our” advantage. That is precisely what Lakoff recommends in his pop books eg Don’t Think of an Elephant etc.
For myself, you may be relieved to know that I have never posited the existence of something called “natural language”.