when words lose their meaning

or, Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo or, h and m has a sustainability ambassador, lol

My ‘sustainability-focused’ diet allows me to create an ‘eco-forward’ mindset, living a ‘nutritionally holistic’ lifestyle consistent with the ‘natural cycles’ of the planet. I am an ‘eco-warrior’. I am a ‘sustainability partner’. I am a ‘naturally-balanced’ consumer. I ‘eco’ therefore I am. 

Language matters. H&M learned this the hard way last week as their new sustainability campaign came unstitched more quickly than a Bode patchwork. Maisie Williams appeared as the brand’s ‘global sustainability ambassador’, a nothing title we normally reserve for Model UN attendees or those kids who pick up the most rubbish at playtime (also, committing just £72 million to sustainable fabrics when you create £4 billion in unsold clothes each year is egregious). It’s also a nonsense term for the brand whose unsold clothes exist in such vast quantities that one Swedish power plant started using them for fuel. ‘Sustainable’ and ‘fast fashion’ are diametrically opposed, like ‘me’ and ‘sports’.

Having a sustainability advocate while polluting rivers is not like putting a band-aid on a bullet hole. It’s like shooting someone, and then hiring a Band-Aid advocate to stand next to them, yelling about the benefits of Band-Aids, all while there’s blood everywhere, and the band-aids were never enough, to begin with.

Semantic Satiation is linguists’ term for ‘when words lose all their meaning’. Leon James, a linguist, coined the term in his McGill thesis. Satiation is a kind of oversaturation. When there is too much of everything, a kind of distance exists between us and meaning; the messier the floor of our room is, the harder it becomes to remember the colour of the carpet. And yet, we become densensitised, used to, our surroundings. 

‘Sustainability’ is a word that has reached its satiation. BP created the carbon footprint to get people to forget about its spills. H & M paid a Game of Thrones actor £??? million to make people forget about its collapsed factories and failure to pay its employees the proposed Living Wage (a goal they promised to meet by 2018), by putting the onus on them to ‘collect Conscious points’.

“It’s a kind of a fatigue,” James says. “It’s called reactive inhibition: When a brain cell fires, it takes more energy to fire the second time, and still more the third time, and finally the fourth time it won’t even respond unless you wait a few seconds. So that kind of reactive inhibition that was known as an effect on brain cells is what attracted me to an idea that if you repeat a word, the meaning in the word keeps being repeated, and then it becomes refractory, or more resistant to being elicited again and again.”

What Adrienne Rich referred to as the ‘process of refining truths’ now takes place between company and consumer. It is a one-way relationship, shaping a more and more violent story, using more and more etherised language.  It’s for this reason that the word salad of so many brands is ripe for satire (my favourite ever account on Twitter is Perfume Ads for Sale, ripping the dialogue of overblown luxury fragrance ads and morphing it into the absurd, using the apparatus of the LVMH-machine against itself).

Decadent used to be a word reserved for the decline of Rome. It’s now used to sell you socks. Luscious might be a fairy tale princess’s hair. It’s now on the label of a herbal essences shampoo. This shifting of our vocabularies for the sake of lead gen acquisition or core value proposition or, ahem, late-stage capitalism, would be fine, if there weren’t a real price to pay for ‘eco-wise’ language. In this respect, marketing is like dating. Eventually, the other party is going to find out that you (your product, your shampoo, your bulgur wheat, or your low-calorie yoghurt) are full of shit.

But the earnest intensity that accompanies so many sustainability brands, the brands like H & M, can make them immune to accusations of greenwashing. Even when H & M faced a backlash against the Maisie Williams campaign, it didn’t pull it or donate to environmentally-friendly (‘eco-conscious’) causes. It will continue to roll out, with the hope that people will buy more pairs of their socks, believing them to be made in a sustainable way, as opposed to being the actual product of indentured servitude.

Heidegger believed that we don’t so much have our language, as our language has us. When multinationals pull the levers of meaning around issues as crucial as climate change and positive action, Heidegger’s proposition becomes a terrifying one; language as the domain of the corporate. It is their power. We love Big Brother. Greenwashing, then, is an excellent term, dismissing the kind of apolitical PR that companies like H&M and Zara have codified.

It’s is so important to hold onto words. Now, just because Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo, is a correct sentence in English, doesn’t make it, in another sense, right. Reading the back of our soap packet because we forgot to bring our phones into the toilets, doesn’t mean we should feel assuaged any its assertions of being ‘eco-wise’ or ‘ planet-nourishing’. As a copywriter, I have written these words for companies with the environmental imprint of a small Oceanic country. I have written them for a company that uses millions of tonnes of water each year because ‘it’s how we’ve always done things’. 

But this meaninglessness is seeping into many other worlds. What exactly did the report of the Scottish Government’s Economic Advisory Group, when they published last week, indicating a movement “towards a robust, resilient wellbeing economy for Scotland”, mean? What did the Home Office mean when it claimed the Napier Barracks were under “Safe and Covid-compliant conditions”? What does it mean when Lord Wilson calls for “more openness” around the Grensill lobbying crisis?

Before I start sounding like the bathroom stalls of an LSE pub, I want to bring things back to Hannah Arendt. Deeds and words, to Arendt, could both be small, but mighty. Words like sustainable, planet-forward, and environmentally-friendly, might seem small, but they have an impact: “The smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of … boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.”