So what if they say it's "chemical free"?

Sun Sep 19 2010

I saw a Twitter exchange today about a Starbucks employee and a homeopath selling their respective brands of instant coffee (just add water) and water (just add medicine) by saying “there were absolutely no chemicals in it”. The former predictably led to the skeptic “pointing to everything around him and saying it was all made of chemicals”. I think this approach is unhelpful. (I don’t think he’s a dick.)

Sure, to a scientist anything made of atoms (i.e., everything) is either a chemical or a combination of chemicals, but to a layperson a chemical is an artificial substance, especially a harmful one. Correcting errors is laudable, but once a usage has established itself it’s futile and counter-productive to insist that it’s wrong. In this case, upon hearing that instant coffee contains “absolutely no chemicals”, nobody will think it is made of neutronium.

The lay-meaning can be problematic, certainly – it’s a fuzzy definition, tainted by connotations that can be exploited, deliberately or otherwise, by marketers – but that’s true of most words. A word’s definition is an attempt to draw a series of straight lines around the fractal set of concepts we instinctively understand when we hear it. You know if something is a religion, or a cult, alive, or human, but the definitions are a little hazy around Buddhism, Catholicism, Alcoholics Anonymous, viruses, fœtuses and missing evolutionary links. You know what a chicken egg is, but was the first one laid by the first chicken or did the first chicken hatch from it? (Annoyingly, a good example of a fuzzy definition is the distinction between a common error and an established usage.) Equally, loads of words have connotations that can be exploited. L-ascorbic acid can be the additive E301 or the ingredient vitamin C. It’s part of why English is a rich language.

My point is that the phrasing is irrelevant. Had the barista said “buy our instant coffee; it’s all-natural”, my skeptic friend might have asked “isn’t that exploiting and reinforcing misconceptions about what’s healthy and environmentally sound?” This would also have been a better response to the original phrasing, because if Starbucks now change their script then we’ll still have to make this second case and they’ll be quite entitled to ask why we didn’t say so in the first place.

Which isn’t to say there’s no skeptical angle to such semantic quibbles. The government arbitrarily redefining “a drinking binge” to mean “slightly more than two pints”, and then claiming that lots of women are “binge drinking” is disingenuous, as is the Soil Association promoting the word “organic” as meaning “grown without chemicals” while maintaining a far longer and less widely-known list of even less evidence-based criteria. In both cases people think they understand what they’re being told but the person telling them is really saying something subtly different.

But when the alternative usage is so common as to be predominant, as it is in the case of ‘chemical’, you’re not standing up for science, honesty and skepticism, you’re ignoring them to dictate how people should use their own native tongue.