Over the past month, my wife and I have made an episode (or two) of ER a staple of our evenings. In our pandemic era of complex public health policy, there is a strange pleasure in watching fictional medical personnel execute the routines of emergency medicine over and over again.
One thing we have noticed about the show—keep in mind that we are only 2.5 seasons in, here, and I’m sure this isn’t a constant over 15 seasons—is the relatively poor management of the workplace, and many characters’ insistence on preferring a workplace that violates HIPAA, creates workflow challenges, and revels in low morale.
So, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that more “language management” isn’t happening in this workplace. My target for this so-called “language management”? The phrase—which I’ve now heard uttered over 25 times in the show—”give me the bullet.”
Usually a request coming from the show’s Dr. Morgenstern (William H. Macy), the request is clear enough: Tell me what’s going on.
But after several minutes of hunting online for evidence of the phrase outside of its use on ER, I was unable to find anything, except in ER fan-fiction (because of course that’s a thing).
The phrase is most likely an invention of the show, perhaps abbreviating bullet from bulletin or bullet point. Or—more likely—it’s a reference on the gun violence that plagues the fictionalized mid-1990s Chicago of the show. At least once or twice an episode, a gurney blows open the double doors into the emergency room with paramedics chanting the lingo I now know recognizes a patient with a gunshot wound. Give me the bullet? Ha ha, am I right?
After a few instances of this, it struck me that a dose of language management would do this ER some good.
I draw the idea of language management from Robert Cialdini, who offers a tremendous example of it in his book Pre-Suasion. While preparing for a presentation to SSM Health, a nonprofit healthcare provider, he is told ahead of time to avoid discussing bullet points, to instead call them information points.
What does SSM Health have against bullet points? They imply violence. On digging further, Cialdini discovers that SSM Health also diligently avoids phrases like attack the problem. Executives wanted to acknowledge that there is real power and meaning embedded in the specific words we use. (This recalls the sneaky power of conceptual metaphor, which I’ve discussed elsewhere.) But is there anything to it? Should we bother discarding bullet points? Should Morgenstern stop requesting that Dr. Greene “give him the bullet?”
Maybe! Cialdini cites several studies that indicate the potency of certain words and language on attitude. And while these aren’t conclusive, they do suggest that there are benefits to language management in certain instances—that paying attention to how language shapes the attitudes of employees in a stressful workplace like I don’t know, maybe a hospital, is worth considering. Someone page Dr. Morgenstern; I have a management suggestion.
Taylor Coe 