Via eye and ear, words beyond numbering zip into the mind and flash a dizzy variety of meaning into the mysterious circuits of knowing. A great many of them bring along not only their meanings but some extra freight—a load of judgment or bias that plays upon the emotions instead of lighting up the understanding. These words deserve careful handling—and minding. They are loaded.
Such words babble up in all corners of society, wherever anybody is ax-grinding, arm-twisting, backscratching, sweet-talking. Political blather leans sharply to words (peace, prosperity) whose moving powers outweigh exact meanings. Merchandising depends on adjectives (new, improved) that must be continually recharged with notions that entice people to buy. In casual conversation, emotional stuffing is lent to words by inflection and gesture: the innocent phrase, "Thanks a lot," is frequently a vehicle for heaping servings of irritation. Traffic in opinion-heavy language is universal simply because most people, as C.S. Lewis puts it, are "more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them."
The trouble with loaded words is that they tend to short-circuit thought. While they may describe something, they simultaneously try to seduce the mind into accepting a prefabricated opinion about the something described. The effect of one laden term was incidentally measured in a recent survey of public attitudes by the Federal Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. The survey found that many more Americans favor governmental help for the poor when the programs are called "aid to the needy" than when they are labeled "public welfare." And that does not mean merely that some citizens prefer H/2O to water. In fact, the finding spotlights the direct influence of the antipathy that has accumulated around the benign word welfare.
Every word hauls some basic cargo or else can be shrugged aside as vacant sound. Indeed, almost any word can, in some use, take on that extra baggage of bias or sentiment that makes for the truly manipulative word. Even the pronoun it becomes one when employed to report, say, that somebody has what it takes. So does the preposition in when used to establish, perhaps, that zucchini quiche is in this year: used just so, in all but sweats with class bias. The emotion-heavy words that are easiest to spot are epithets and endearments: blockhead, scumbum, heel, sweetheart, darling, great human being and the like. All such terms are so full of prejudice and sentiment that S.I. Hayakawa, a semanticist before he became California's U.S. Senator, calls them "snarl-words and purr-words."
Not all artfully biased terms have been honored with formal labels. Word loading, after all, is not a recognized scholarly discipline, merely a folk art. Propagandists and advertising copywriters may turn it into a polished low art, but it is usually practiced—and witnessed—without a great deal of deliberation. The typical person, as Hayakawa says in Language in Thought and Action, "takes words as much for granted as the air."