Books & arts
Old wine, new bottles
Framing policies in focus-grouped language gets politicians only so far
Last month Ronnie Cowan, a Westminster MP from the Scottish National Party, wrote to Britain’s Department for Work and Pensions on behalf of some incensed pensioners in his constituency. Pensioners are often incensed, but these complaints were not about inflation indexing or retirement ages; they were linguistic. The irate retirees did not want their pensions to be called a “benefit”.
In some other Anglophone countries, this might sound odd. What could be better than a “benefit”, which (America’s) Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as “something that produces good or helpful results or effects or that promotes well-being”? In Britain, the word means much the same in most contexts, but its other definition is more salient: as the Oxford English Dictionary has it, “That which a person is entitled to in the way of pecuniary assistance, medical or other attendance, pension, and the like, under the National Insurance Act of 1911and similar subsequent Acts”.
在其他一些以英语为母语的国家，这听起来可能有些奇怪。还有什么能比“benefit (福利)”更好的呢？(美国的)韦氏词典将“benefit (福利)”定义为“产生好的或有帮助的结果或效果或促进幸福的东西”。在英国，这个词在大多数上下文中的意思基本相同，但它的另一个定义更为突出：正如《牛津英语词典》定义，“根据1911年《国民保险法》及其后的类似法案，一个人有权获得的金钱援助、医疗或其他照料、养老金等。”
This is where teachers of English might helpfully note the difference between denotation (dictionary meaning) and connotation (associations that may not be part of a formal definition). In Britain, “benefits” carry a strong connotation. For many people, a benefit is money handed out by the state, often to the undeserving. Consider “Benefits Street”, a documentary series on Channel 4 that was widely accused of portraying recipients of benefits as scroungers.
In America the equivalent term is “welfare”, which has been applied to government aid for poor families since at least the 1930s. From the 1960s and 1970s, as Republicans became the champions of small government, they began to characterise welfare-recipients as disempowered dependents on the state, or even, sometimes, as conniving parasites upon it. Campaigning for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan famously told the story of a highliving “welfare queen” from Chicago (whose exploits turned out to be somewhat exaggerated).