On Words and Stingrays
One of my favorite instances of the importance of words involves stingrays.
I worked as a zoo educator one year, which was just as amazing as it sounds (although it did have downsides). My job, along with my colleagues, was to hang out at various parts of the zoo, talking with people about animals. We delivered specific messages (sometimes in specific ways, sometimes however we wanted), and also improvised based on what visitors were interested in or on what the animals were doing.
During the summer that I worked at the zoo, we opened a stingray touch experience. All the educators had great foundational knowledge (and we had some real rock stars in the group), but since this was a new exhibit, there was inevitably a lot of learning and tweaking.
In addition to talking about the stingrays, we had to deliver safety information and behavior guidelines. Visitors had a big need to know that the experience was safe, so we always told them that we had cut the stingrays’ spines.
One day, our boss relayed some feedback from a girl. She’d heard the educator say “cut the spines” and had understood it to mean “sever the backbone” — a frightening association and not good for the stingrays! We educators had been using the word “spine” in a different sense — like a sea urchin’s spines, another common topic for us — and hadn’t registered the other connotation.
After that, we changed our language, telling visitors that we trimmed the barbs on the stingrays’ tails — which in fact was more accurate, since just like trimming fingernails, it doesn’t hurt or harm the rays, and their barbs do grow back. It was a much better way to convey the same idea.
In education (as in life overall), facts and messages are important, but how you deliver them is just as vital. People won’t hear you past your poor words, so you need to make them good. You might want to cut the spine, or you might want to trim the barb — pick the right one.
