“To make someone feel emotion,” that’s a dictionary definition of the word, evoke. There’s the related word – evocative – defined as “tending or having the power to evoke.”
Beware of evokers and evocative words.
Signaling that he may want to ease up on “coronavirus-related restrictions in a matter of weeks,” as a number of media have been reporting, the president has been speaking and tweeting evocative words.
The president’s “top experts are saying it could take months for life to go back to normal,” according to an article in Business Insider. But despite that, the president said; “I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter.”
Words like ‘raring to go’ can evoke a feeling, an emotion. Does POTUS want us to be thinking; Hey! We’re the USA! We’re raring to go! Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
Of course, we all want to get going. But maybe, according to experts in medicine, epidemiology and related fields, that will take more time than the president would like.
POTUS also suggested, in Business Insider, “there will be ‘suicides by the thousands’… We have to put the country to work… You can’t just come in and say, ‘Let’s close up the United States of America.’”
He has a way with evocative words, no doubt about it. When he says “suicides by the thousands,” is he taking us back to the 1930s-era Great Depression?
Maybe your parents or relatives talked about the Great Depression, about people struggling to get by when the global economy crashed in the ’30s. And maybe you heard about suicides during that period in history. My folks talked about it, and I read about the Great Depression in school books.
Evoking emotions with evocative words, what’s the reason someone — anyone — would decide to do that?
That is the question.
Harvey Radin is former senior vice president in charge of corporate communications and media relations, Bank of America Western Region. He makes his home in Redwood City, CA.