Speech Incontinence - Before you dash off to find it in a dictionary or your favorite search engine, it’s not there. But the probability is that you most certainly do know someone (or many) who has come down with this common, contagious, and very dangerous infliction. If it seems there is a great deal of discontentment in the world where you find yourself regularly taking breaks from social media and conversations from time to time, exhausted from all the thought smog, it’s probably the pandemic of speech incontinence that’s plaguing you. It has become so normal for us to wade through the thick waves of balderdash day in and day out, navigating everyone’s opinion on every subject matter under the sun, that we don’t even realize how paralyzing it has become. Speech incontinence is a self-created infirmity whereby one spends a great deal of their daily schedule offering their untrained and unsupported opinion and thoughts on everything from pandemics to Cold Wars to parenting. They have a thought, they have a platform, and they have an audience (you), so they impose.
Social media is a computer-based technology that facilitates the sharing of ideas, thoughts, and information through the building of virtual networks and communities. Like it or not, humans are now intimately linked together through social media whereby it is not unusual for one to now know what a friend, business associate, or mere acquaintance is eating for lunch and dinner, how one is spending free time, and one’s thoughts on politics, life, philosophy, and virtually anything one has on their mind that they wish to unleash unto you, and thus into the world. It has become so easy for people to become overnight experts and virtue signalers on social media, that many spread information with reckless abandon and even worse, self-serving indifference, all under the guise of sharing.
The difficulty is, how do you know when to take stock in someone’s posted idea or spoken word, and when do you disregard it as meritless.
Two hundred and forty-seven years ago, it wasn’t necessary to concern one's self with such issues because information, misinformation, and disinformation didn’t spread so easily. Hence, Paul Revere and his fellow news spreaders rode all night to cover 20 miles, in order to alert their fellow Yankees that the British were coming. Today, that would have been a Tweet.
While there may well be some upside to such effortless communication with the masses, there are most certainly downsides as well. The greatest of these we will call “speech incontinence.” There is a pervasive lack of restraint when it comes to sharing information, for those that share any and all information that streams into their consciousness. In times past, the local newspaper or respected publications curated content and ideas for us. Today, everyone has a platform and everyone is reporting, and thus it’s incumbent upon us as listeners, readers, and purveyors of truth to curate the good content from the bad. That is the smart, logical, well founded, timely researched ideas and thoughts, from those that are simply the product of fast, uncontrolled, and reckless banter known as speech incontinence.
Here are three clues that someone posting or speaking content is suffering from speech incontinence:
Denotative vs Connotative Language - Denotative words are those that are textbook words where the meaning is literal. These are words that typically do not create emotion or feelings in the receiver but definitively denote a meaning. Connotative words are words that are generally more symbolic and encompass emotional meanings which tend to stir the reader. For example, using words like “bleeding heart” or “shrewd” can tend to create negative emotions in a reader. A group of people is denotative and a mob of people is connotative. Those who demonstrate speech incontinence, typically post quickly and often thoughtlessly, because emotion takes over, and thus they are much more likely to fill their speech with connotative language. They are feeling emotion and thus they post or verbalize emotionally. Someone who rations their ideas, thoughts, and beliefs, based on emotional triggers rather than on ideas that are read, researched, and pondered, is more likely to have speech incontinence. Please note, this is not always the case. Of course, it is possible for someone to have an idea or thought, that has been responsibly read and researched and is supported by emotion, but when it comes to someone with speech incontinence the thought or idea they are spreading is heavily tainted with emotion and absolutely lacks the logic to support the premise.
Rhetoric - Rhetoric is language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience but is lacking in sincerity and meaningful content. Rhetoric is easily spotted if one is looking for it. It comes cleverly wrapped in the form of a definitive position statement, yet there is no actual proof, nor way to prove the claims. Where facts are suspiciously absent, rhetoric unfortunately triumphs. Advertisers and self-promoters use this all the time. There are plenty of baby product commercials that essentially claim, “Moms who love their kids buy this product.” It is all rhetoric. While it’s popular in advertising and self-promotion, it’s also used in everyday conversation. The fact that they believe, or others believe, or that anyone believes something doesn’t make it true. Here’s what’s important to note about rhetoric; its intention and design are to unjustly persuade without proof. Don’t fall for it. It’s just another type of speech incontinence.
Fair Weather Experts - The primary culprit of speech incontinence is social media, which has created an environment where anyone can instantly and dangerously become an “expert” on all said topics from medicine, to politics, to war, to parenting, you name it. Speech incontinence strikes when such “experts” slither out of the woodwork at the same time in which droves of others climb out of the pit. In other words, if you want to get the real information on a political candidate, research older articles on that person before they were the hot topic of discussion. If you want to find a real expert on anything, find the person who was an expert on that topic before everyone was a self-proclaimed expert on that topic. There are humans who have spent a better part of their lives studying and researching very precise to broad subject matters before the herds became armchair interested in the subject matter. If there’s a subject that matters to you, find the party who is more than a fair-weather expert.
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