Use your words: Journalist Carol Off warns about our increasingly toxic political discourse in a new book

Few people know the power of words quite like Carol Off. As a career journalist, including 16 years as the host of As It Happens on CBC Radio, words were her stock in trade.

In her latest book, she attempts to take back six terms she says have been “hijacked, weaponized, and semantically bleached” by extremists. At a Loss for Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage looks at ‘freedom,’ ‘democracy,’ ‘truth,’ ‘woke,’ ‘choice,’ and ‘taxes’ and how their meanings have changed in recent years.

“What I was looking for were six words that I thought had a story, that had history, that lined through our liberal democracy, through our civil society, that represented something in the larger world, in Canada, but also represented something very profound in my own personal life,” she said.  

“I write a lot about my own experiences growing up, and so I needed words that would actually speak to that and that I felt I owned, that were mine.”

John Ackermann speaks with Carol Off, author of At a Loss for Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage

Woke is a good example of a word that started out with one meaning and now has another.

“Woke goes back to the last century when Black people in the United States would instruct each other, be woke, be careful, watch over your shoulder, because they were dealing with all kinds of violent elements who were out to get them,” she said.

“Woke has been taken over by the hard right, by extremists and not even extremists, because we’re hearing it among conservative politicians in Canada, the United States, that they’re out to get the ‘woke extremists,’ ‘the woke agenda,’ ‘the woke mindset,’ ‘woke-ism.'”

She argues ‘taxes’ may be the most important word of them all, as it represents our obligations to each other as members of a civilized society. It also makes up what Off calls the “follow the money” chapter of the book in which she tries to lay out who really benefits from our “age of rage.”

“There’s no money to be made in being rational and reasonable for big tech and the social platforms,” she said.  “There’s money to be made in how angry we are with each other.”

She says she got the idea for the book in 2020, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when she noticed how strident the language of our political conversations had become.

“It created so much insecurity,” she said. “And when people feel insecurity, they are easily manipulated, they get confused, they get angry, they get defensive.”

Off says the book is neither a linguistic critique nor a political thesis, but a warning. She feels in this “age of rage” it’s important to know where words come from – and where they are going – before the rhetoric gets too out of hand, leading to an even more divided society.

“Really start to listen to language, the language around you, the rhetoric, because it starts that way. It starts long before you have wars and conflict and extreme things in your world. It starts years earlier with language, with rhetoric, and we learned that from what we saw with Hitler and the Nazis.”

Off ends on a hopeful note, calling for compassionate leadership and more rational and civil language to address the challenges of our time, from climate change to housing shortages.

“We have the courage and ability to imagine more for ourselves and our societies,” she writes. “It’s just that we’re running out of time.”

“We need to talk to each other, to be able to disagree with people’s opinions without hating them for expressing them.”

At a Loss for Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage is published by Random House Canada.