Do campaign slogans change the way you think?

The Economist's excellent language blog, Johnson (named for the dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson), notes how the term "pro-choice" came into being and looks into other political uses of language.

NPR has an interview with Linda Greenhouse, the author of a book on the debate that led up to the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling. She explains how the phrase "right to choose" (later "pro-choice") was coined by a pro-abortion campaigner:

...she wrote a memorandum framing the issue of how the pro-repeal position should be described: "Right to life is short, catchy, composed of monosyllabic words—an important consideration in English. We need something comparable. Right to choose would seem to do the job. And ... choice has to do with action, and it's action that we're concerned with."

Being "pro" something is of course preferable to being "anti". Nobody wants to sound negative. Plus, it puts the other side at a disadvantage. Being "pro-life" makes your opponents out to be pro-death. So "pro-choice" was a smart counter-move at a time when women's rights were the big issue of social change: it diverted attention from the life/death dichotomy by recasting it as something else.

The writer then notes other uses of this technique: the pro-Israel lobby, for example, and adds:

Given the tendency for the sharpest controversies to settle into this kind of stark framing, it's a bit of a surprise that it hasn't happened for two of the biggest ones: creationism and global warming. Anti-creationists often call themselves "pro-science", but their adversaries have not chosen a pro-position—perhaps because you don't need anything so trivial as a catchphrase when God is on your side.

As for environmentalists, they would obviously be "pro-planet", but the sceptics are evidently struggling to come up with an alternative. Pro-warmth? Pro-carbon? Pro-weather? You can see the difficulty. The closest thing I've been able to find is an argument that it's possible to be both "pro-profit" and "pro-planet". And if you're worried about warming but can't be bothered to reduce your emissions you could always go pro-albedo.

It's useful to keep this in mind, because it happens all the time. as in the Obama administration's refusal to use the words "islam," "Islamist" and "Islamic" in talking about the war on terror.