Respect for the power of words reveals how language can lift and unite or wound and hurt the diverse members of your audience. This respect develops into cultural sensitivity. If you read the historic writings on human communication, you will find little about cultural sensitivity. The ancient Greeks, for example, worried only about speaking to other male Athenians who were “free men” and citizens. Only in today’s world, with its emphasis on empowering a wide spectrum of cultures, lifestyles, and races and its pursuit of gender equity, has cultural sensitivity emerged. as an important standard for effective language usage.
There is a high probability that your classroom audience will include people from different cultures. As listeners, they may be sensitive to clumsy efforts by speakers to identify with folkways that aren’t their own. Campaigning for the presidential nomination in his native South in 1992, Bill Clinton was comfortable using such folksy expressions as “my opponents are squealing like a pig caught under a gate.” Speaking in Georgia in the same campaign, however, Senator Bob Kerrey from Nebraska was less adept. At Atlanta’s Spelman College, Kerrey declared that if Clinton got the nomination, Bush would open him up “like a soft peanut.” Kerrey’s listeners looked at each other with puzzled faces. Someone must have spoken with his speechwriters, because in later speeches in that peanut-producing area Kerrey changed the expression to “boiled peanut.” The lesson seems clear: Don’t try to be what you’re not, or you may look ridiculous.
A lack of cultural sensitivity almost always has negative consequences. At best, audience members may be mildly offended; at worst, they will be irate enough to reject both you and your message. Cultural sensitivity begins with being attuned to the diversity of your audience, appreciative of the differences between cultural groups, and careful about the words you choose when referring to those who may be different from you. Although you must make some generalizations about your audience, avoid getting caught up in stereotypes that suggest that one group is inferior to another in any way. Stay away from racial, ethnic, religious, or gender-based humor, and avoid any expressions that might be interpreted as racist or sexist.

Nothing can damage your ethos more quickly than a glaring misuse of language. Mistakes in grammar or word selection can be disastrous because most audiences attribute such errors to incompetence. They are likely to reason that anyone who misuses language can hardly offer good advice. When you select your words, be careful that they say exactly what you mean to say.
Occasionally beginning speakers, wishing to impress people with the size of their vocabularies, get caught up in the “thesaurus syndrome.” They will look up a simple word to find a synonym that sounds more impressive or sophisticated. What they may not realize is that tl’ie words shown as synonyrn.s often have slightly different meanings. For example, the words “disorganize” and “derange” are sometimes listed as synonyms. But if you refer to a disorganized person as “deranged,” you will see what we mean.
People often err by using words that sound similar to the word they want. Such confusions are called malapropisms, after Mrs. Malaprop, a character in an eighteenth-century play by Richard Sheridan. She would say, “He is the very pineapple of politeness,” when she meant pinnacle. Thus a major league baseball player trying to explain why he had forgotten a talk show interview, said: “I must have had ambrosia” (which probably caused his amnesia, which is what he apparently meant). Archie Bunker in All in the Family was prone to malapropisms, such as “Don’t let your imagination run rancid” when he meant rampant. William J. Crocker of Armidale College in New South Wales, Australia, collected the following malapropisms from student speeches in his classes:
A speaker can add interest to his talk with an antidote. [anecdote]
Disagreements can arise from an unintended conception. [Indeed they can!]
The speaker hopes to arouse apathy in his audience. [sympathy? empathy?]
Good language can be reinforced by good gestation. [gestures]
The speaker can use either an inductive or a seductive approach.36 [deductive]
Students, ballplayers, and fictional characters are not the only ones who make such blunders. A reporter once praised an attorney for his ability to dissemble a bicycle. As a colleague observed with heavy irony, no doubt the man could “dissemble”—after all, he was a lawyer. But “dissemble” means to conceal and deceive, often by talking around a point. What the unfortunate reporter was praising was the lawyer’s ability to “disassemble” the bicycle. Elected officials are also not above an occasional malapropism. One former United States senator declared that he would oppose to his last ounce of energy any effort to build a “nuclear waste suppository” [repository] in his state.38 And the Speaker of the Texas legislature once acknowledged an award by saying, “I am filled with humidity” (perhaps he meant moist hot air as well as humility).

The lesson is clear: To avoid being unintentionally humorous, use a current dictionary to check the meaning and pronunciation of any word you feel uncertain about.

The denotative meaning of a word is its dictionary definition or generally agreed-upon objective usage. For example, the denotative definition of alcohol is “a colorless, volatile, flammable liquid, obtained by the fermentation of sugars or starches, which is widely used as a solvent, drug base, explosive, or intoxicating beverage.”
Connotative meaning invests a subject with emotional coloration. Thus, the “intoxicating beverage” is no longer just a chemical substance but either “the poison scourge” or “the oil of conversation.” Connotative language intensifies feelings, whereas denotative language encourages detachment.
Many of the techniques of language that help listeners see subjects can also arouse feelings. Simile and metaphor may kindle emotion by the relationships and associations they suggest. Representation can arouse by the focus it gives to a subject. For example, Leslie Eason impressed her Vanderbilt class members with her ability to frame metaphors that stirred deep feeling as well as reflection. She began her speech on the disease of racism by reciting lines of a poem she had written: “What if I go to Heaven, and then to me they tell, White Angels enter here, Black Angels go to hell.” In another speech, she used a traditional metaphor to describe the plight of ambitious women: “Glass ceilings still exist.” Women, she said, can rise just so far in the workplace before they bump into invisible barriers. But soon she gave the metaphor a novel twist. Other women, she said, never even get a chance to rise. They are stuck in low-pay, low-ability jobs, the victims of “sticky floors.”
Such techniques are well suited to stimulate emotions. They produce what Longinus called the image, the natural language of the passions. Writing some two thousand years ago, this Roman rhetorician noted that images intensify feelings when “you think you see what you describe, and you place it before the eyes of your hearers.”3 During World War II, when London was bombed every night, the British people needed reassurance that they would prevail. Sir Winston Churchill built images of hope in his radio speeches. One example is the following, developed around a metaphor of fire:
What he [Hitler] has clone is to kindle a fire in British hearts . . . which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration he has caused in London have been removed. He has lighted a fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burnt out of Europe.’
Another useful technique to arouse feeling is onomatopoeia, the tendency of the sounds of certain words, such as buzz and hiss, to imitate the objects of their meaning. Suppose you were trying to describe the scene of refugees fleeing from war and starvation. How could you bring that scene into focus for listeners who are far away? One way would be to describe an old man and his granddaughter as they trudge down a road to nowhere. The word “trudge” is an example of onomatopoeia. Its very sound suggests the weary, discouraged walk of the survivors. Onomatopoeia can bring us into a scene by allowing us to hear its noises, smell its odors, taste its flavors, or touch its surfaces. As it overcomes distance, it also arouses feeling.
Hyperbole, or purposeful exaggeration, can also arouse feeling. Speakers
often use hyperbole to encourage action or force listeners to confront problems. Note the use of hyperbole in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final speech:
Men for years now have been talking about war and peace, but now no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer the choice between violence and nonviolence in this world, it’s nonviolence or nonexistence… . And in the human rights revolution, if something isn’t done and done in a hurry to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed.