Several years ago I was sitting in a “writing for history majors” class at Eastern Michigan University when the professor shined a light on something I had never noticed. The class was a seminar on how to perform scholarly research and writing, so we spent a good amount of time discussing the best ways to use language to communicate about history. There were classes on the proper use of footnotes, but also on more conceptual subjects like the avoiding words that alienate parts of the potential audience.

During one class, the professor made a comment that probably occupied five or ten minutes of our time but has lived in my brain ever since. It’s the kind of thing that you don’t notice at all until you start seeing it everywhere. It’s not quite “Truman finds out he’s on a TV show,” but it’s not something you can avoid once you know it’s there.

Our lexicon relies heavily on violent metaphors to communicate decidedly non-violent concepts.

Let me provide a few examples to demonstrate the concept. We often say you “beat” someone when we mean “defeated.” You “killed” it if you did something really well and “bombed” if you didn’t. We have a “war” on drugs, poverty, and Christmas(?!). Internal disagreement also might be called a “civil war.” If someone freaks out, “they went nuclear.” If a person lands a devastating insult, it’s not unusual to say “shots fired.” If you ask for something, maybe a date, and get denied, you were “shot down.” When you insult someone, it’s a “burn.” The list gets even longer if you include the variations and open the window into sporting events or politics. Metaphors of violence are extremely common in non-violent contexts.

I didn’t realize this before my professor explained it, but even since that day in the basement of McKenny Hall, I’ve found it troubling for a few different reasons.

The first is that it’s simply insensitive to victims of actual violence. “Shots fired” is often used to mean “damn, he just landed a hilarious insult,” but imagine that from the perspective of someone who has actually been affected by gun violence. It’s a trivialization of actual harm by folding it into less serious discourse. Keep in mind, this isn’t a debate about the merits of “safe spaces” in which people can be shielded from life’s unpleasant aspects, it’s bringing the language of violence into conversations that don’t warrant it. It is one thing to say people should be able to speak openly about important matters like guns, sexual assault, etc in any context, it’s another to simply use imagery of those horrors to punctuate a point that has nothing to do with anything of the sort. To me, this is reason enough to watch your metaphors, but there are actually two reasons I think are much more important.

First among them is that using the language of violence to speak of non-violent conflict leads people to see those conflicts in a more adversarial manner. Let’s use “War on Christmas.” This is a phrase coined by individuals who believe we’re becoming too accommodating to people of other faiths and that we should not hold back in our celebration of a holiday simply because other people don’t celebrate it. I won’t comment on the merits of that view, but calling it a “war” is patently absurd. There is no crisis. People’s lives are not at stake. There are not laws limiting speech involved, it’s merely a collection of people who think “happy holidays” is a better way to go. By calling this a “war” or calling a football game a “battle,” we’re characterizing disagreement and competition as existential conflicts. Violence is existential. If you lose a war, really bad things happen. If cashiers say “happy holidays” or your sports team loses, nothing happens. There is a difference between “I prefer this outcome” and “this outcome will significantly harm me.” By using violence as a metaphor, we begin to treat normal human conflict as if it’s much more serious. That is a situation ripe for escalation and leads to seeing people who merely disagree as enemies.

Additionally, using violent metaphors for everything leaves us without anywhere to go when something truly dangerous happens. I often explain this to people using a 1–10 scale. If you’re always maxing out your language (a ten), there’s nowhere to go when you need to really get someone’s attention. If you’re always at a ten, it’s impossible to know what matters and what doesn’t. We don’t have words that go beyond these violent metaphors. What happens when there is a legitimate challenge to free speech? We will call it an “attack on liberty” or a “war on the First Amendment,” but we’ve been calling everything an “attack” so how do we get an actually alarming thing to rise above the normal discourse. There’s an element of crying wolf here. If all of our terms for non-critical problems use the words of existential threat, we have no words left to distinguish when the actual crisis comes and we wind up boiled alive like the frog in the lukewarm pot. We have to temper our metaphors because we need to save the extreme language for truly extreme situations. If normal discourse is always a ten, we will fail to stop impending crises before it is too late.

I don’t know when this started. I suspect it’s a very old phenomenon. But in our increasingly urgent media environment with intense polarization, I am concerned it is getting out of control. There’s a strong relationship between overuse of “breaking” news banners and the violent escalation of discourse. Perhaps it is cyclical, but I believe 9/11 had a big impact. The need for constant updates and round-the-clock coverage was high. That’s when most cable news channels made the ticker permanent. Unfortunately when the crisis ended, our behavior didn’t go back to normal. We’ve been on high alert ever since. The urgency of an actual attack and actual war took hold and it never left even as the danger receded.

I don’t know if we can undo this or if we’re doomed to live like this forever, ratcheting up and up until the energy is released in a very bad way. I try not to overweight the importance of my own era. The world has faced many challenges. History has turned over many times. It’s possible we’re at a high point in the cycle and we can’t tell the difference between a trend and a fluctuation. Perhaps my warning is too alarmist, but I do think this is how we wind up letting things get out of hand. By treating normal things as extraordinary you lose the ability to treat extraordinary things as such.

Odds are you’re not a world leader or media mogul, so you probably can’t shape the worldwide discussion, but in your own work and your own life, I encourage you to rein in your use of violent metaphors in cases where they aren’t appropriate. You can always trace the origin of a crisis in hindsight, but many people will miss it in real time because the warnings are mixed in with false positives. Precision matters. Save the most critical words for the most critical situations. Use urgency responsibly. Treat opponents as opponents and enemies as enemies. Being able to tell the difference is vital, as is knowing when it’s an enemy knocking at the door rather than an opponent.