Name-calling vs Labeling
What is the difference, when does each apply, and can both be at work at once.
Name-calling
Attaching a hostile label to a person, group, or idea so that the audience rejects it without examining the evidence.
Labeling
Assigning a person, group, or position to a ready-made category, so that the audience responds to the category's reputation instead of to the thing itself.
The differences
| Name-calling | Labeling | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | An insult: a bad name attached to a person, group, or idea so that it is rejected unexamined. | A category: a person or idea is filed under a type, and the type's attributes are assumed. |
| Tone | Openly hostile. The word is meant as an attack. | Can be neutral in tone, even clinical. "Populist", "elite", "activist", "extremist". |
| Mechanism | Disgust or contempt, transferred to the target. | Stereotype: once the label is on, everything is read through it. |
| Origin | One of the seven devices of 1937. | From sociology's labeling theory and from journalism; the Language family's quieter cousin. |
| The counter-move | Set the name aside and ask what the person or idea actually proposes. | Ask what the label is doing in the sentence and whether the person fits it on the evidence. |
| The tell | You would not say the word to the person's face in a serious conversation. | You would, and it would sound like a description, but it is doing the arguing. |
"The so-called experts" and "the fanatics on the other side" in a speech about a policy. Neither phrase says what the experts or the other side think.
A news report refers throughout to "the activist" and "the businessman" on opposite sides of a dispute. Both are described accurately; the labels have told the reader whom to trust.
Often, and the line between them is one of degree. A label used with enough contempt becomes name-calling; a name used often enough becomes a label and loses its heat. Both do the same work, which is to settle the argument by classification. The reader's move is the same for both: remove the word and see what is actually being claimed.