Introduction by Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem

This online resource may be more necessary now than ever before, especially as we emerge from the era of fake facts and choose-your-own news. We all know about globalization, but two less acknowledged forces are also shrinking the world today: Technology is allowing us to reach across boundaries of space and culture, and English is becoming a global language. This ought to increase accuracy and understanding, yet different cultures receive the same word differently, the right term may not be the best known, and, in many countries, public relations regrettably now exceeds journalism as a profession.¹ With billions of people online and no fact-checker in the sky, the danger of “spinning” or being “spun,” of persuading by deception or being persuaded by it, is dangerously high. In fact, we are drowning in a sea of nonexistent "alternate facts."

Unspinning the Spin was created to help everyone understand and be understood. Consumers and creators of media are the most obvious beneficiaries, but anyone can benefit from this up-to-date guide on the background, current uses, accuracy, alternatives, and best practices for choosing and de-coding common words and phrases. This resource goes beyond the scope of a dictionary or thesaurus. It’s the result of mining a wide variety of fields for accurate, inclusive, creative, and clear words and phrases. As a compendium that's easy to consult, practical, informative, and witty, it is indispensable for everyday use.

Its application is as widespread as its sources: world politics, civil society, journalism, academia, corporations, anti-racism, popular culture, social justice movements, sexual liberation, medicine, public health, disability activism, poverty and class, science, street cultures, popular music, environmentalism, slang, sports, psychology, self-help, democracy movements, film, theater, the United Nations, business, the military, philanthropy, indigenous cultures, and words and phrases in other languages that have come into popular use in English.

Some of the dilemmas this guide solves are recognizable. For example, one group’s “terrorist” is another’s “freedom fighter,” but a thoughtful alternative is “insurgent,” or describing the actual goal of violence factually instead of characterizing the act. Many problems have solutions that need only be popularized: for instance, “maternity leave” excludes fathers, adoptive parents, and the reality of many families, but “parental leave” or “family leave” are easy replacements. Other errors may seem small—say, using sex-marked job titles and masculine pronouns as if they were generic—yet half the world’s talent rests on adding feminine pronouns and using gender-free titles. A phrase like “alternative lifestyle” assumes that a norm exists, or that sexual orientation needs a euphemism, or that people have “lifestyles” rather than lives. Expressions like “the Black problem” or “the Jewish problem” turn the victim into the problem—literally—when “white racism” or “anti-Semitism” would better describe the situation.

Political realities also may be conveyed with humor: For example, a group falsely claiming “grassroots” is said to have “Astroturf.” Unacknowledged realities may be conveyed by invented phrases; for example, although the U.S. has not had a military draft since Vietnam—and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been fought by an “all-volunteer military”—more observant and insightful language reflects the reality of just who volunteers and why: There is a “poverty draft,” an “education draft,” and a “Green Card draft.” Other phrases are pure spin: For example, the use of “death tax” instead of “inheritance tax” makes it sound as if one were being taxed for dying, not for skewing the social order with unearned wealth; “right to work” denies the right of workers to organize, “right to life” includes fetal but not adult female life; and "the life of the mother" presupposes that she wants to be a mother, while "the life of the pregnant woman" is both more accurate.

In addition to such individual examples, Unspinning the Spin suggests commonsense democratic guidelines. Terms designating individuals, groups of people, or parts of the world should be self-chosen whenever possible. The “people-first” guideline of many in the disability rights movement not only keeps the individual from disappearing (a “person with diabetes” is more than “a diabetic”) but also reminds us to keep the person visible in other cases. For example, “undocumented worker” is more accurate than an “illegal,” which not only characterizes someone by one act, but uses language as judge and jury. Saying “prostituted woman” makes the woman visible as more than just a “prostitute,” and an “enslaved man” is more than just a “slave.” Using the verb form makes the process visible. When cross-referenced to “labor trafficking” and “sex trafficking,” such words and phrases also become issue briefings. Readers learn, for example, that more people are enslaved in the world today than were enslaved in the 1800s, and that 85 percent of them are women and children.

Unspinning the Spin was written by Rosalie Maggio, a distinguished authority on language who brought to this book—now an online resource—nearly 30 years of her passion for precision and style in phrasing. Published in 1987, her The Nonsexist Word Finder was followed by other books on discriminatory language: The Bias-Free Word Finder won awards from the American Library Association as an outstanding reference and from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights.

Here, her own research has been further enhanced by that of the Women’s Media Center, an organization run for and by U.S. and international women media professionals who are working to increase accuracy and diversity in the media. Rosalie poured her love of words into updating this online version of Unspinning the Spin. Tragically, she passed away just weeks before its launch.

Language can reveal, conceal, and even define reality. This becomes all the more evident in news reporting, entertainment, and other media, where language frames and creates imagery that becomes the basis for our actions (including elections) and shapes reality (including democracy or the lack thereof). For example, imagery that equates whiteness with positive qualities and darkness with negative qualities perpetuates a racial hierarchy that is both externally enforced and internalized, all the while being consciously and unconsciously denied for what it reveals: white supremacy. The misnaming of an issue—for instance, when adversaries of “affirmative action” put it on the ballot as “preferential treatment”—may determine whether it succeeds or fails, regardless of its content. Indeed, one book was focused on language: Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff. Even punctuation became the subject of a bestseller: Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss.

But Unspinning the Spin is a more comprehensive and multidisciplinary guide to words and phrases—their meanings, sources, backgrounds, suggested uses, and alternatives—than has ever been made available so far. It’s a guide for journalists and editors in this and other countries, for bloggers creating their own media and for government officials creating policy, for students and teachers at all levels, for activists, workers in communication fields, and for any reader who loves the English language. We’re happy to note that the tone of Unspinning reflects not only Maggio’s dedication to fair and accurate language, but also her pleasure in words and their power—and her sense of humor. This is not just a useful resource for scholars and laypeople; it’s fun to read.

The guide is both searchable and organized alphabetically for easy use, with cross-references to related words, phrases, and issues. Words or phrases that have been historically subject to spinning and coding are accompanied by a background briefing that explains their misuse and possible remedies.

As for the two of us, Robin and Gloria, we bonded decades ago, not only in terms of our feminism and other political activism but also in the shared, cheerful obsession of being writers. We procrastinate, and we both need deadlines. We both love puns and number 2 pencils. We both enjoy reading Fowler’s Modern English Usage (second edition, please) as if it were a novel, and citing E. B. White and William S. Strunk Jr.’s great Elements of Style with glee. Furthermore, having morphed from manual then electric typewriters to computers, each of us still prints out drafts to hand-edit—using those number 2 pencils—before inputting revisions. Neither can defend this practice, except to insist it “feels right” to hold the text and read it on the page. Each of us swears she sees details there that she can’t spot on her computer screen. We both count ourselves incredibly fortunate to get to play lifelong with the magic of words—and call it work. We’re especially grateful for this elastic, dynamic, genderless English language, in which a noun like “table” can be simply “it,” and we don’t have to attribute sex to chairs and pens.

Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedo, warns, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” Clearly, there was “spin” in the Agora. But it was the philosopher Susanne K. Langer who wrote, “The notion of giving something a name is the vastest generative idea that ever was conceived.”

We honor those words in this guide of fair and accurate naming—and we delight in them, too.

October 2021

New York City

¹ In the U.S., there are more than six times more public relations professionals than journalists. The latter includes newspapers, plus TV and cable news, but the former excludes those working independently for corporations, advertising agencies, nonprofits, and the government. PR professionals earn more than journalists do, on average. Figures from the U.S. Census Bureau show that in 2019, there are 6.4 PR professionals to every one journalist.

Note: Unspinning the Spin - the Women's Media Center's Guide to Fair and Accurate Language was first published as a book in 2014. It was re-edited and updated for its release as an online resource in 2021.

“This resource goes beyond the scope of a dictionary or thesaurus. It’s the result of mining a wide variety of fields for accurate, inclusive, creative, and clear words and phrases. As a compendium that's easy to consult, practical, informative, and witty, it is indispensable for everyday use.”