Category: apologies
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Linguistic Gaslighting: Disclaimers as anti-performative discourse
This is another post in a series on the language of abuse, connected to an online catalogue which I hope will help others to identify and resist linguistic harm. In this post, I look at how disclaimers (a form of anti-performative discourse) can be used to minimise violence, to coercively control, to manipulate and to…
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Relative Abstraction and Concreteness: The example of the non-apology
“Impersonalisation abounds in the language of bureaucracy, a form of the organisation of human activity constituted on the denial of responsibility, and governed by impersonal procedures which, once put in place, are wellnigh impermeable to human agency.” Theo van Leeuwen, The Representation of Social Actors In my most recent blog post, I introduced a catalogue…
Religious Language 