Words matter. How words are arranged matters.
Writers spend a lot of time thinking about what word to use and how to use it. Sometimes words flow but, at other times, finding the perfect word to encapsulate a concept can be a struggle.
This was brought home to me in high school by a teacher who gave us the following sentence: "I hit Johnny in the eye in the park this morning."
And then pointed out that adding the word "just" to this sentence can produce a number of different meanings depending upon where you put the "just."
"I just hit Johnny in the eye in the park this morning" and "I hit Johnny in the eye in the park just this morning" don't mean the same thing.
It is not just writers, though, that think about words.
Television advertising, for example, is full of instances of very careful language use. And is often designed to mislead people.
As an example, a number of companies make a claim along the lines of "we are against animal testing. We never test any of our products on animals."
It is meant to convince you, the consumer, that the company holds itself to a higher ethical standard than other companies with the same products.
The idea is that you, as a consumer, are not contributing to animal cruelty and can feel good about the product that you are buying.
We are lead to assume that the compounds in your beauty cream or shampoo, or whatever, has never been tested on poor defenseless bunny rabbits.
But, of course, that is not what the advertisements actually say.
What they say is the company is against animal testing. And "they" don't test "their products" on animals.
But that doesn't mean the products weren't tested on animals.
They could be contracting the tests out and still make this claim. They could be testing the individual components but not the final products and still make this claim. They could be testing their products on people and still make this claim.
Most likely, though, they are just using some of the many millions of commercially available compounds that have already been thoroughly tested on animals and for which a wealth of data exists.
Take something as simple as glycerin, which is found in many soaps and creams. Has it been tested on animals? You bet. For example, the "LD50" - or "lethal dose for 50 per cent of an animal population" - for rats is greater than 20 ml per kilogram of body weight, when taken orally.
Somebody, somewhere, sometime, did the tests to find out just how much glycerin you would have to give a rat to kill 50 per cent of the individuals in a population.
As a consequence, a manufacturer can now buy glycerin, put it into a beauty product, sell the product without doing any further testing.
The tests have already established that it is a "safe" compound.
And they can righteously proclaim their "products haven't been tested on animals". A careful choice of words.
That said, we sort of expect advertisers to mislead us or misdirect our attention. That is the name of the game. It is part of the sales job.
Does anyone truly believe that driving a sports car will instantly produce a beautiful blond companion? Or that eating a particular brand of cereal will make you lose weight?
But, should the people we elect to lead us engage in semantics?
It would be nice if the answer was no but that is not to be.
Press releases are carefully crafted. Speeches are carefully considered.
Last year's election campaign was full of such instances.
"As far as I know, the budget deficit will remain at $495 million dollars." Sounds pretty definitivem until you realize that after the election, the proponent can say "well, at the time, I didn't know."
Ignorance is bliss.
More recently, Finance Minister Colin Hansen wrote a rebuttal letter to The Citizen in which he pointed out the HST will not apply to "commercial imports" and therefore, I was wrong when I said that our imports would cost more.
hat may turn out to be true but I doubt it. Imports depend on transportation and transportation costs are going up.
They depend on brokers and brokerage fees are going up. They depend on warehousing and storage costs are going up.
All because of the HST.
The minister is correct in saying that where HST is explicit in the costs to a company, it can be recovered.
But, where HST is hidden, there won't be a mechanism for recovery. And in the end, those price increases will be paid at the point of sale by the consumer.
What's in a word?
Everything.
Words can be twisted and turned and made to say almost anything - especially when talking about the HST.
