The Subtle Flattening
This morning I read Huxley’s Words and Behaviour. The short essay does a similar job of Orwell’s Politics and the English Language: it highlights how strange and flattening language can be. Particularly for truly dreadful things like war.
By flattening I mean using bland or abstract language to dampen the emotional impact of words. Sanitising is a readily available and similar term, but I don’t feel it points to the removal of feeling precisely. So, flattening.
Huxley highlights use of the word "force" particularly, which has such broad use it severely flattens the more violent cases of “force”:
The “force” that is war, particularly modern war, is very different from the “force” that is police action, and the use of the same abstract word to describe the two dissimilar processes is profoundly misleading.
He posits that with less flattening, as a collective society we’d be less likely to tolerate more horrific things:
By personifying opposing armies or countries, we are able to think of war as a conflict between individuals. The same result is obtained by writing of war as though it were carried on exclusively by the generals in command and not by the private soldiers in their armies. (“Rennenkampf had pressed back von Schubert.”) The implication in both cases is that war is indistinguishable from a bout of fisticuffs in a bar room… For, once we understood, we should have to make some effort to get rid of the abominable thing.
Would I rather have a less flattened media diet? Yes!
Do I think this would reduce war? Quite possibly.
In my day to day media consumption, wouldn’t less flattening make me more stressed? Right now, reading about Russian and Israeli ‘strikes’ on Ukraine and Gaza, I don’t feel much beyond a numbing sense that this is bad and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Some predictions on how I and the average UK reader would react to less flattened language:
- Be more horrified
- Be more wanting to do something
- Actually be more likely to do something. Because stronger emotion can cause one to reconsider one’s standing assumption that one cannot influence international affairs. Specific language can also make the situation feel more real and thus potentially changeable.
Wouldn’t this be overwhelming for everyone in the long run? I have no idea. More exposure to horror can be overwhelming. On the other hand I have a theory that getting more accurate information can be good for one’s wellbeing: not because it’s that great to be exposed to the horrors of war, but because a flattened passive state is no route to aliveness.
I’m not proposing any significant ramp up in horrific media coverage. Just a de-flattening of the language events are reported in. No need to change the photos or videos shown at all.
I envision a web app which de-flattens any article for you. It could be based on an LLM which de-flattens content while retaining all the core facts.
For example, on the 22nd of August 2025, the BBC had a story with the header:
Images show aftermath of reported strike on school site in Gaza
With access to the story itself, Claude Sonnet 4 rewrote it to the following in one pass, remaining fully factual:
Images show charred bodies, burning debris after Israeli airstrike kills dozens of Palestinian civilians sheltering in Gaza school
I prefer the rewrite. It gets across what is happening on the ground much better. And I notice I feel better about the rewritten version. Strange as it may seem. Reasons I think I prefer it:
- The headline is being more authentic: a horrific thing really has happened
- The headline induces an emotion more congruent with the actual events, reducing dissonance: I don’t want to feel neutral about it
- I feel less helpless
- I don’t have to work to decode what “reported strike on school” means
I imagine the proposed app as a Chrome extension which activates and de-flattens all stories automatically on any news site. Or a news aggregator site could be made which has de-flattened versions of all stories.
Someone could make it.