I found this to be a useful, helpful book with a variety of practical strategies for civil, courteous communication. The starting arguments Elgin offers as to why this is so important are twofold. First, she says that hostile, discourteous language frequently escalates not merely to broken relationships but also to violence. It is hard to argue with the first point, and in a time of volatile public discourse, where (among other examples she gives) “dissing” someone is sufficient cause for murder in some quarters, it is pretty easy to see her point about the tendency to violence.
Her second argument is that this hostile language is a consequence of how we see disagreements: we very, very often see them as combat, which means that there must be a winner and a loser, and all is fair in war, so who cares about your feelings? I think this is an excellent observation on Elgin’s part, and does much to explain how malevolent so much conversation so readily becomes on the Internet (for example). Much, much better would be to treat disagreement as a shared opportunity to discover the truth—one to be pursued humbly and charitably.
I wonder, though, just how far Elgin is willing to go with her argument. She says that we have an obligation to avoid hostile language because of the consequences it often brings, and I am loath to disagree, but if we are to be held responsible for others’ reactions to our language, are we responsible for reactions to other things we do? To raise the obvious, controversial example: is a provocatively-dressed woman in any way responsible for any evil responses coming from the men around her? That sounds like blaming the victim of course, but if I am responsible in some way for how you react to my choice of words and tone of voice then it seems difficult to argue that a “tarted-up” woman in a singles bar can’t reasonably expect to avoid any blame for wolf whistles or worse (God forbid) directed her way. If I am wrong about this analogy to Elgin’s argument, I would be happy to learn why. As it stands, I can only wonder if Elgin sees this consequence of her overall argument.
A word must be said about the Kindle edition. It is terrible. It is pretty clear that no one bothered to proofread the OCR’ed text. It is posh with typos. Likewise, it is a disservice to readers of digital editions to leave references to “page 56” (for example) that have no meaning on our devices. How about hyperlinks instead?
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