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Whiplash
18/07/2008
Not just a personal injury, now a political metaphor
It's always interesting when a new buzz-word pops up in political discourse, and when the US Presidency rolls round to renewing itself again, it's likely that new ones will appear. What makes it particularly interesting for this personal injury worker is that the word that seems to be suddenly everywhere is 'whiplash'.
What seems to be happening is that the McCain-favouring parts of the press are suddenly all using 'whiplash' to refer to the effect of Barack Obama's statements recently. Whether he's actually switching positions rapidly or having to combat oversimplifications of his position with explanations of nuances is a question that probably shouldn't be addressed in a personal injury website; we don't care what the political viewpoints are of a compensation claimant, we just care that the justice they deserve is done.
Another part that's interesting, though, is that it seems to be a left-leaning columnist from the New York Times who's kicked off the use of this term in an article titled "Lurching With Abandon". There's been plenty of discussion of the article across the internet, but what you notice is that the writers have to deal with the terms of the argument as set out in the original piece.
This echoes the creation of 'flip-flop' in the previous campaign; the saturation of the media with the term meant that those who disagreed with this representation of Kerry still had to deal with the term, which can only have done injury to his campaign.
You can see, in George Orwell's 1984, the imagined end of an attempt to shape a population by the control of language. A later speculative fiction author, Philip K Dick, wrote, "The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
Now, that's in fiction; I don't mean to imply that Oceania is on its way. Nor Newspeak, nor the scarier versions of Room 101 and Big Brother that the TV shows have replaced.
But I did notice that various bits of the press over here in the UK have since mentioned that Gordon Brown is suffering whiplash moments. I wouldn't claim that the term's reached any kind of saturation point here - after all, if you type it into Google News, you still get the type of personal injury that we run compensation claims for coming up first. And while Obama's on the front page, Brown's not.
That said, we don't have a general election on the cards at present. Perhaps, when that rolls into view, Brown-flavoured whiplash will start appearing heavily in the press. Perhaps it'll depend on who wins in America. Until then, though, we'll keep plugging away at compensation claims related to the neck injury, not the metaphor.
