The Frame Game

If you go to the online contact form for U.S. Congressman Mike Pence, the representative from the 6th District of Indiana, you’ll notice the list of prefixes that are available to you as you enter your contact information:

Mr.
Ms.
Miss.
Mrs.
Mr. and Mrs.
Dr.
Dr. and Mrs.
The Reverend
Father
The Reverend and Mrs.

Apparently, Congressman Pence does not believe in the following career/family [...]

Demi Moore, on having children:
Once you hit three, when you’re outnumbered, it’s really, like, what’s the difference between (three or) four or five?
Well, I guess if you’ve already got a vehicle that holds “3 to 5 children,” the exact numbers aren’t too significant. But maybe when couched in terms of ecological footprint, it matters [...]

Author and playwright Robert Anton Wilson writes about Understanding E-Prime, the notion of abolishing all forms of the verb “to be”. It has some interesting thoughts on how “semantic hygiene” can lead to a better life:
To understand E-Prime, consider the human brain as a computer…The wrong software guarantees wrong answers. Conversely, finding the right [...]

“Climate change could devastate the global economy…if left unchecked. Unless we act now … these consequences, disastrous as they are, will be irreversible.” And so the frame is established: Climate change is a phenomenon that is happening to humans and that needs to be fixed or stopped. We are passive victims in [...]

It’s amazing to me to see the number of things that Come Under Fire these days. Policies, remarks, institutions, countries, people and so on. When someone or something is coming under fire and we read about it in the headlines, it’s strange that in many cases, the “target” is portrayed as having done [...]

The actions and decisions of living creatures, generally humans, make up what we tend to call history. Therefore, history does not repeat itself - people repeat history. If there is some cosmic imperative to recreate patterns from the past, it comes from within, and we are responsible for it.

Democrats and Republicans both have recently been reinforcing the frame of “coddling terrorists” as the thing you do when you don’t support the Bush administration’s policies on warrantless wiretapping, rights of prisoners, and foreign relations in general. Dictionary definitions for “coddle” include: “to treat tenderly; nurse or tend indulgently; pamper,” and “to treat with extreme [...]

We all play the frame game. We play it because words have meaning, and whether we’re evoking frames or having frames used to push, pull or steer us in a particular direction, they’re always at work in our lives. The Frame Game weblog is a chronicle of the frames at work in the [...]