The Softened Word

We used to name the weather: rain,
And feel its cold upon the street;
Now storms are “moisture events” again,
With gentle warnings, soft and sweet.
A fact once stood on sturdy feet,
It asked to be examined plain;
Now it must wear a softer sheet,
Lest someone find its edges vain.
The headlines learn the practiced sigh,
A tear is worth a thousand proofs;
One chosen child beneath the sky
Can sell a roof above all roofs.
The numbers wait outside the door,
Their coats are wet, their voices low;
But feeling enters first once more,
With lights arranged to make it glow.
“Be moved,” the anchor says at nine,
“Be angry—then remain with us”;
The screen supplies the proper sign,
The sponsor thanks the frightened fuss.
In Meet John Doe, the noble cry
Was useful while it filled the square;
The men who owned the ink would try
To turn its hope to private air.
And if the movement would not bend,
If common people kept its flame,
They would prefer its public end
To letting truth outrun their name.
No party owns this oldest art,
No faction holds the only mask;
The left can tug the tender heart,
The right can make fear do its task.
A label takes a human face,
A slogan makes a neighbor strange;
Then thought is hurried from its place,
And anger calls itself “a change.”
We polish words until they hide
The thing we ought to plainly see;
“Collateral” means someone died,
“Messaging” means: agree with me.
The clever merchant of alarm
Will call his hook a public good;
He sells protection from the harm
His tale has planted in the wood.
Yet reason need not sneer or freeze,
Nor make compassion disappear;
It asks what happened, who agrees,
What proof is solid, what is fear.
Come, reader: let the loaded phrase
Be weighed before it takes command;
Truth needs no manufactured haze—
It needs a mind that understands.

…

DCG

—Cleaned transcript
The reason so many idiotic ideas now run society—where everyone listens to their feelings and stops needing facts or reality—might be that even major publications have switched completely from reasoning to emotion.
This is day 13 of The Psychology of Masses.
Researchers analyzed language across millions of publications going back to 1850. Until around 1980, language rooted in evidence and logic kept rising. Then the curve flipped. Starting almost exactly in 1980, fact-based language began declining while emotionally loaded language climbed instead—and that shift accelerated sharply after 2007.
Rational language is what real science runs on. Emotional language is what activism runs on, because an activist is producing a version of reality that confirms what they already believe.
You see the result everywhere. Entire groups get mobilized and controlled through emotionally charged language, because emotions are how you actually control people—not statistics. Use the right trigger words, the right examples, and hit the specific feeling you are after, and people will do what you want without ever checking whether the underlying claim was true.
Which specific emotions to use, and exactly how to trigger each one, is in The Psychology of Masses.
What the clip is attributing
The historical-language claim appears to be based on a 2021 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), “The rise and fall of rationality in language,” by Marten Scheffer, Ingrid van de Leemput, Els Weinans, and Johan Bollen.
The researchers analyzed Google Books Ngram data—millions of digitized books in English and Spanish—from 1850 through 2019. They found that words they categorized as relating to rationality, science, technology, quantification, and formal social systems rose in relative frequency after 1850, while words associated with intuition, belief, personal experience, sensation, and sentiment fell. Their trend reversed around the late 1970s/1980s, with a more pronounced increase in sentiment- and intuition-related language around 2007. They also reported broadly comparable patterns in fiction, a nonfiction-heavy book subset, selected other languages, and New York Times text.[nih]
Examples of the paper’s “rationality” language include words such as “determine,” “conclusion,” “data,” “result,” “test,” and “procedure.” Its contrasting category contains words such as “feel,” “believe,” “imagine,” “heal,” “dream,” and “comfort.” That distinction is central to what the speaker is paraphrasing.[nih]
Verification: accurate core, misleading conclusions

—

The clip has a legitimate scholarly source behind its narrow historical-word-frequency claim. But it turns that limited finding into a far larger political and psychological story that the study does not prove.
The defensible claim is: some selected word categories in a large digitized-book corpus changed direction around 1980, with a further shift around 2007. The unsupported leap is: therefore society has stopped caring about facts, activism is inherently emotion-driven, and emotionally charged language controls people.

Research attribution and context: The historical language claim is based on Scheffer, van de Leemput, Weinans, and Bollen’s 2021 PNAS study, “The rise and fall of rationality in language.” Using Google Books Ngram data from 1850–2019, the authors found that selected rationality-related words rose in frequency until roughly the late 1970s/1980s, while selected intuition- and sentiment-related words declined; the trend later reversed, with a sharper shift around 2007. The study measured long-run changes in word use—not whether people became irrational, whether facts ceased to matter, or whether activists control people through emotion. Its interpretation is disputed: a published response argued that the pattern may chiefly reflect increasing informality in writing rather than a cultural movement from reason to emotion.[nih +1]