Instructional &
Informational Posts
Speaking in Tongues (SiT) will not improve your Spanish or Mandarin. (It won’t make them worse either.) Instead, SiT helps us become fluent in the language of health and wellness, scrutinizing the zoo of text on labels around us. Can "bio" be added to anything? How do I pronounce that additive (and why is it there)? We're looking closely and critically at commonly-used words and phrases, with a concern for the consumer and a delight in language itself.
A common breakfast landscape is a cereal box rising out of a cluttered sea of newspaper. Time to metabolize grains and text.
But either the local news or the ingredients seem much too complicated for flakes that float in milk. Your newspaper is meant to be talking, but surrounding food shouldn’t be so chatty!
Your kitchen pantry is an unkempt zoo of text. Who taught the tomato sauce to speak? It’s just tomatoes and basil, right? For the moments you did ask its opinion, why the need to speak in tongues?
The library of information on food labels causes much bewildered blinking. We want to know what’s contained therein and what the product claims to be. Yet the words printed to present this information confound rather than clarify.
One obstacle is the inarticulacy of ingredients. What are these compounds? Why so many syllables inside such a small snack?
Another is the mystery of labelling conventions: how can companies list “tocopherols” and “calcium disodium EDTA” but then cavalierly get away with writing “natural and artificial flavours”? It’s as if the average consumer is assumed to be a chemist, yet with a habit of sneezing every third word.
And finally, marketing is the thread that binds all inanity. To what extent are we manipulated with seductive language by corporate Casanovas?
SiT deigns to decipher cryptic phrases and words that are shamelessly slung over our heads.
We’ll break through the seduction of catch phrases and look critically at the language of health, led by a quartet of concerns: content, claims, regulations around these, and the joy of language itself.
Your daily-recommended iron and irony.
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First up? Natural & Artificial Flavours. Stay tuned.
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Emily Glazer likes to babysit other people’s cats and to drum on any surface that'll answer with a sound. She advocates for women’s health through research and writing (so far) and her soul delights in jazz. Delight in a moment with Emily here.
