In the grand theatre of public discourse, we’ve forgotten the weight of a single phrase.
In the grand theatre of public discourse, we’ve forgotten the weight of a single phrase. Words now drift about as lightly as candyfloss. Take Trump’s latest billing: standing next to Netanyahu and declaring his peace plan the greatest event in civilisation. Quite something, considering the pyramids, the printing press, antibiotics and the Beatles are apparently just minor warm-up acts. And because it came wrapped in his familiar sideshow bluster, it was digested as just another Tuesday headline and fed into the algorithm’s furnace.
This is the point. We are no longer reading deeply; we’re grazing, doomscrolling, clicking. In this economy, the incendiary phrase is king. Truth, meanwhile, is loitering backstage with the understudies, waiting for an entrance that never comes.
And while the circus rolls on, Manchester buries its dead. Thirty-five-year-old Jihad AlShamie carried out the car ramming and stabbing attack outside a synagogue. Antisemitism thrives in this fevered climate of incendiary dialogue, where words are lobbed like grenades. Those who are incandescent online, who mistake provocation for argument, fail to see the endgame of their rhetoric: words don’t just sharpen debate, they sharpen knives.
The scandal is not “fake news” but the capitalism of clicks. Outrage is profitable. Hate monetises better than facts. Entire industries, politics, media, and PR are hooked. Every slogan, every campaign, every viral headline is an emotional explosive. And those of us who work in communications can’t pretend we’re just technicians turning out clever lines. We are responsible for the fallout.
This is the existential crisis for anyone who deals in words. What are you doing about communication in an environment defined by anti-trust? We are standing on the edge of an AI revolution whose consequences we still haven’t begun to reckon with. Unless we anchor ourselves in proportion, literacy and care, the current will sweep us away.
The way out is not hand-wringing; it’s education. Critical literacy must be the civic muscle we train. People need the tools not only to consume language but to interrogate it to distinguish performance from truth, to resist the narcotic hit of cheap outrage. Without that, we are handing the megaphone to manipulators and calling it progress.
The responsibility of language is not academic. It is real, urgent and bloody. Demagogues rise on words long before they rise on power. History has already shown us where incendiary dialogue leads. And yet here we are again, applauding the theatre, then feigning shock when blood is spilled.
Trump’s “greatest event in civilisation” may read like a farce, but it is part of the malaise: a culture that treats words as spectacle, divorced from consequence, monetised for division. Until we rediscover their weight and until we teach others to resist the tricks we will keep sleepwalking into a dystopian hell.
Language isn’t entertainment. It’s power. And power mishandled always has a body count.