Words are a powerful tool to understanding stigma and connotations. The usage of words, their diction, and the emotion attached to it, the reaction it triggers, all create an environment that either stigmatizes or honors the activity that the word denotes. For example, there was a recent study done with respect to aversion towards certain words; the word “moist” seemed to be an inherently unpleasant word and almost 30% of the subjects in the sample set had a knee-jerk reaction to it. Apart from social transmission and connotation, the association of the word with respect to describing bodily functions makes it disdained.
If we remove our romantic attachment to vocabulary, words essentially are just sounds. And the emotional language of certain words grabs our attention and red flags it thereby making it “categorically averse”. The study also found that political stance, religion, or sexuality did not matter when it came to contempt for the word.
“Disgust is adaptive. If we didn’t have the instinct to run away from vomit and diarrhea, the disease could spread more easily. But is this instinct biological or do we learn it? Does our culture shape what we find disgusting? This is a complex and nuanced question,” Dr. Paul Thibodeau, who had been working on the study for over four years, concluded.
What I find interesting from that conclusion is the question that Dr. Thibodeau put forth – “Does our culture shape what we find disgusting?” Essentially, he is talking about the stigma associated with words. One such word is an addiction. No matter what the activity might be, when the word addiction is associated with said activity, it triggers a negative emotional response. Be it addicted to coffee, heroin, music, fitness, alcohol, or even people.
The word “Addiction” is derived from the Latin word for “enslaved by” or “bound to”. Enslavement has never been a pretty picture. Does the word addiction have a stigma associated with it because of its emotional language or the adaptive collective stigma associated with the act of addiction itself?
My love for the hypothetical world and my romantics for language lead to a speculation —Would drug usage be more common if the word addiction did not exist or was not categorically averse? Let’s play some word association. Try looking at addiction, the act, without attaching the adapted stigma to the word itself. All drugs of abuse, from nicotine to heroin, cause a particularly powerful surge of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens.
The likelihood that the use of a drug or participation in a rewarding activity will lead to repeated usage is directly linked to the speed with which it promotes dopamine release, the intensity of that release, and the reliability of that release. The paragraph describes how “addiction” is caused without using the actual word itself. Did replace the word addiction with “repeated usage” change anything? In my opinion, it did. When you take away the years of stigma and aversion attached to an act, you can finally look at it from an objective lens. This is because our only connection to understanding acts and activities is through words and our understanding of the particular word.
Without stigma associated with addiction, there is a good chance that in all likelihood, drug usage of any kind from caffeine to methamphetamine would be more common. If addiction, through positive replacement, is changed to “repeated usage”, which is more polished and less horrid, the act itself would be more common. This was just a thought experiment. This does not take away from how monstrous and deathly the consequences of drug usage and abuse are.
(When he isn’t writing, the creative producer with The Rascalas watches a lot of ‘cat videos’ on YouTube)