ZIMMERMAN VERDICT PART 10: THE SEMANTICS

Anyone who has trained with me in the last few years has heard me talk about what I call “combat semantics.” Smart debaters know that many words in our language have multiple shades of meaning, and they’ll often try to tell people that one of those words meant “B” when you used it, when in fact you really meant “A”. We saw this in more ways than one in the Zimmerman case.



At a bail hearing in April of 2012, George Zimmerman told the family of the deceased Trayvon Martin that he was “sorry.” The next morning, newspapers all over the country ran headlines like “Killer Apologizes.”

We all speak English here. You apologize for having done something wrong. When you say “I’m sorry” in any number of contexts, such as this one, you’re probably trying to convey, “I’m sad for your loss, and I feel compassion for you, and I wish this bad thing had never happened.” But another connotation of “sorry” is “I apologize,” and “apologize” in turn carries the connotation of guilt. At the risk of cliché, “Self-defense is never having to say you’re sorry.”

Another example – already discussed earlier in this blog series, in one of the commentary sections – is “pursue” versus “follow.” It is clear from the evidence that for a brief period of time, Zimmerman followed Martin – indeed, he answered “Yeah” when the dispatcher asked him if he was following the other person. Those who wanted to pillory Zimmerman turned that into an imperfect synonym: “He pursued him!”

To “pursue” carries the connotation of intent to seize and control. A police pursuit is intended to end with the laying on of hands which takes the pursued into custody. Pursuit of wild game implies the intent to turn the animal into a carcass that will be butchered and devoured. Even “pursuit of happiness” implies that when you succeed, you will possess that happiness. There is absolutely nothing in evidence to indicate that Zimmerman ever did, or even ever intended to, lay hands on Martin and take control of him. But this simple choice of words – by those who indeed did “pursue” Zimmerman in their way – helped to convince much of a nation that Zimmerman’s actions were not what the evidence now shows them to be.

“Combat semantics” is a debater’s game. Trial lawyers, if you think about it, are debaters playing for much higher stakes than the high school Debate Society.

And clearly, many of those who were out to hang Zimmerman were, uh, master debaters.

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