Frank Luntz does something that political rhetoric before him did mostly by instinct. He tests it.
His method is dial testing and focus groups: an audience turns a dial continuously while listening, registering approval second by second, and the transcript is then mapped against the trace. Words that produce a rise are kept. Words that produce a fall are replaced. The policy does not change; the vocabulary is selected empirically for effect.
Two of his results are in general circulation.
The estate tax became the death tax. The levy is identical — a tax on the transfer of large estates at death, affecting a small fraction of estates. Estate is a word implying wealth and implying that the subject is somebody else's problem. Death is a word implying mortality and implying that the subject is you. Support for repeal moves substantially between the two phrasings, and the shift is measurable in polling that varies only the term.
And in a memorandum written for Republican clients in 2002, leaked and widely reproduced, Luntz advised on environmental language. The memo argues that the scientific debate is closing against us but not yet closed, that voters should be given the impression of ongoing scientific uncertainty, and — the line that became famous — that it is time for us to start talking about climate change instead of global warming, because climate change is less frightening than global warming, and while global warming has catastrophic connotations, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.
The irony that climate change is also the term scientists prefer, for reasons of accuracy, does not diminish what the memo shows: the term was selected for its affective profile, not its precision.
The mechanism is chapter 63's reference point, industrialized. What Luntz's dial is measuring is the connotative load a term carries before any argument is made — the emotional prior attached to the word, which then colors everything evaluated inside it.
The practice is not confined to one party or one country, and treating it as though it were would be a mistake. Every serious political organization now does message testing. Estate tax and death tax; undocumented and illegal; pro-choice and pro-abortion; regulation and red tape; public option and government takeover; tax relief, which presupposes that taxation is an affliction. The pairs exist on all sides and are chosen the same way.
The detectable signature is coordination. Individual speakers naturally vary in vocabulary. When a phrase appears simultaneously across many speakers who have no other reason to converge — the same three words, in the same construction, from a dozen politicians and commentators in the same week — that is not a linguistic drift. It is distribution, and it means someone has tested the phrase and circulated it.
Which is worth noticing for what it tells you: the phrase in front of you has been selected from alternatives on the basis of measured effect on people like you. That is not an argument against considering the position. It is a reason to state the position in your own words before you evaluate it.
Cross-ref: framing effects chapter