Is language inherently manipulative?

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So many people in my life seem to choose what they say to me in order to get a desired result from me. I suppose I do this to some extent too. So is language coercive?

No, but it can be used for that purpose. See the concept of "loaded quesions" and "phrasing the debate". Those sorts of things are example of how people can use language to 'trap' you. Also see Sapir-Worth theory, which is a VERY WEAK concept of it (i agree more with the 'language follows culture, people develop things for concepts which fit their environment - i.e. why Dutch has so many insults dealing with diseases- a good portion of their population died from such relatively recently)

Read Korzybski.

Verbal language is like bullets coming at me, moving too fast for me to deal with because I can't understand their true meaning so quickly. It feels like people are trying to control what I am thinking about by communicating things to me and I am easily manipulated. So I have to remain vigilant against it.
That's interesting about the Dutch. The culture is using language to promote a desired behaviour.

Korzybski thought that people do not have access to direct knowledge of reality; rather they have access to perceptions and to a set of beliefs which human society has confused with direct knowledge of reality. - Wikipedia

Thank you, that is interesting and I will read more on this.

Language fails miserably at trying to communicate direct experience. Part of this is because the same word has slightly different meanings to different people depending on the contexts they learned it in and their personal experiences. The biggest reason is that the map is not the territory and a lot of people confuse the symbol for the reality.

Also, each language has a world view inherent in its structure. The grammar of the language one thinks in affects how one views the world. This is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and its extreme form has been discredited, but I'm pretty sure there is some effect nonetheless. How could there not be?

I've used a bastardised version in 'the map is not the terrain'. Didn't know that's where it came from.

This is something I've been trying to get my head round of late, though I've been thinking more broadly than language, in terms of concepts.

Anyway, is there a difference between reality and the concepts and language we use to describe it? That is, if these things constitute our lived reality, formed as they are from sensory input (different sense organs would perceive differently, if we didn't have sight would we conceive of it, etc), and that to be known reality has to be perceived, does it make sense to consider a reality different than the one we know through language, concepts, etc?

I've been going round in circles on this one.

I think reality is unknowable. We try to create realities in the form of a persona and build a myth around ourselves, hoping others will buy into it. Language is one of the tools people use to do this.

Nietzsche wrote a bit about words as deception (in The Antichrist). It's not the clearest writing, but he probably has a point.

Language is just a tool and like any other tool it can be used for good or bad purposes; it can be used to help or harm.

Yes sometimes.

" A mime can only tell the truth. In order to lie you need language."

______Marcel Marceau

Language when misused can befuddle and can confuse.

Words are slippery and have multiple meanings and context is generally grasped in a subjective, rather than an objective fashion.

Interesting. If it cant manipulate you it cant move you, if it cant move you it isnt art.

http://mathmutation.blogspot.com/2014/0 ... guage.html
^some overview of a language deliberately invented to be less ambiguous and malleable than English.