Out of the Sentence, Out of Mind
How grammar makes perpetrators invisible and turns victims into a problem
Introduction
Recently I have become increasingly aware of the possible effects of word choice and language use. Partly through my interest in how journalism shapes the way we experience the news. But also because years of working as a mindfulness and resilience trainer have taught me a great deal about the impact of language on what someone learns—or what insight arises—during a training day. And writing articles, which I have been practicing for some years now, has been its own teacher.
Even so, one of the most formative experiences of the past few years was an article I read about how perpetrators and victims are ‘handled’ in news reporting—and how this has a profound effect on the way society treats victims.
When I recently watched a TED talk about how the language you speak influences how you describe a bridge, I decided the time had come for an article about language and grammar. So here we go.
Guilt or Accident
Imagine you witness an accident. Someone knocks over a vase—in a museum, no less, so it is almost certainly valuable. In English, you would probably describe it as “He knocked over the vase.” In Spanish, you would be more likely to say, “Se cayó el jarrón”—the vase fell. In that second sentence there is no ‘perpetrator,’ no personal pronoun. The falling of the vase was simply an event, nothing more.
This apparently minor grammatical difference has surprisingly large consequences. Cognitive linguist Lera Boroditsky showed in her research that English speakers later remembered more clearly who knocked over the vase, while Spanish speakers more readily remembered that it was an accident. Two people witness the same event, yet remember different things—because their language has ‘trained’ them to attend to different aspects. And it goes beyond memory: when the same scene is shown to English and Spanish speakers and the English-speaking half describe what happened using ‘he did it’ while the Spanish-speaking half write ‘it happened,’ the first group assigns significantly more blame to the person involved—more than chance alone would predict. Language steers not only our memory but also our judgment.
Lera Boroditsky’s TED talk can be found at the bottom of this article.
The Grammar of Disappearance
In her book Speaking Freely1, linguist Julia Penelope describes a mechanism she called the grammar of non-agency. She showed how sentences about violence are gradually reworded and how, with each step, the perpetrator fades further out of view2 while the victim undergoes a peculiar grammatical journey.
An article I read on this subject made a deep impression on me. Follow the progression of the sentences below:
John hits Mary. A factual description of what happened. John is the agent—the one acting. Mary is the object: the one to whom something is done. The sentence describes an act and names a perpetrator (the ‘agent’ in the grammar of non-agency). It is an active sentence3.
Mary was hit by John. Also accurate, but something subtle has happened: Mary has been pushed forward and becomes the grammatical subject. She is ‘promoted’—but not to agent. She becomes the subject of something that happens to her. John is ‘demoted’ to an adverbial phrase, a tag at the end of the sentence—and grammatically optional at that. Notice how naturally the next step follows:
Mary was hit. John has left the building. Mary is still the subject, but now of a non-agency sentence—a sentence without a perpetrator. Only one condition remains. Something happened to her, but who was involved? No idea.
Mary is a battered woman. The final step is the most definitive. Mary is no longer the subject of an event; she has become a noun. She has merged with what was done to her. The violence John committed is now part of her identity. She wears it as a label.
What happens across these four sentences is, to my mind, shocking. Mary has undergone a grammatical transformation: from object to subject of the sentence. But in reality, she has been set up. She is no longer someone John hit—she is someone who has a problem because she is a battered woman.
You may recognize how often you see headlines in the media about people who ‘have a problem,’ without the perpetrator ever being named. I have included a few examples further on.
Activist, author, and filmmaker Jackson Katz used the same example in his widely viewed TED talk (which I only saw for the first time recently) to show how deeply this mechanism runs through the way media, courts, and public opinion speak about domestic violence. We do not ask, ‘Why does John hit?’ We ask, ‘Why does Mary stay with him?’ Grammar has, quietly and subtly, steered us towards victim blaming.
Katz added another observation: even the term ‘violence against women’ is grammatically a passive construction. There is no acting subject. It is something that happens to women—not something men do.
Every Day in the News
As Johan Cruyff once said, “You’ll only see it once you understand it.” Once you understand it, you start recognizing this mechanism more and more often. You find it every day in the newspaper and on news websites—for example, in coverage of road accidents.
A motorist hits a cyclist. That is what happens. But follow how the reporting unfolds and pay attention to the grammatical position of each of the two people involved:
Motorist hits cyclist. The motorist is the subject, the agent. The cyclist is the object. Clear, direct, honest, and as factually accurate as can be.
Cyclist hit by motorist. The diabolical reversal: the cyclist moves forward and becomes the grammatical subject. But just like Marie/Mary, it is a false promotion—the cyclist is the subject of something that happens to him. The motorist has been pushed back to an adverbial phrase at the end—grammatically marginal, almost a footnote. He can slip offstage through the wings.
Cyclist hit by car. And there goes the driver. This could well be the headline we read in the paper4. The vehicle has replaced the driver. It was not a person who decided, drove too fast, or failed to look—a thing was in motion. The human element has been erased; all that remains is mechanics.
Cyclist hit. The car has gone too. All that remains is a cyclist who has a problem and has been ‘hit’—by no one, by nothing, apparently out of nowhere. Fate that befell him.
In four steps the cyclist has made the same grammatical journey as Mary: from object to subject of the sentence. But here too, it is a trap. As the grammatical subject of a passive sentence without a perpetrator, he is no longer someone to whom something happened through the actions of another—he is someone who apparently lives in a world where this sort of thing simply occurs. And in that world we inevitably begin to ask, was he wearing a helmet? Was he visible enough? Was he on the correct side of the road? The motorist—along with his actions and his responsibility—has long since disappeared from view.
This is rarely a deliberate conspiracy in newsrooms (I hope). It is the natural gravitational pull of the passive voice, which in news language is especially strong because it sounds concise and neutral—while being anything but.
Staying Power and a Thick Skin
Of all the so-called social media, I now only use LinkedIn. There I have been following Zoë Papaikonomou for some time—a journalist focused on diversity, inclusion, and equality who investigates, above all, the workings of power. Almost daily I come across a post from her correcting a newspaper headline or news title.
What I also read, incidentally, is that journalists like Papaikonomou regularly receive hate mail. It appears that putting your head above the parapet provokes a reaction. For me, that is an extra reason to support and follow journalists with this mission5—because the headlines you sometimes encounter are just horrible, and it is genuinely necessary that established media are held to account for them.
Three More Sets
In the workplace:
The manager groped the employee.
The employee was groped by the manager.
The employee was groped. Manager gone.
There was an inappropriate situation between two colleagues.
In the history books:
The Netherlands colonized Indonesia, plundered it, and held it by force6.
Indonesia was colonized by the Netherlands. The diabolical reversal.
Indonesia was colonized. The Netherlands is out of sight.
Indonesia experienced a colonial period. Colonialism has been converted into a historical era—something that simply happened to Indonesia, like an ice age or a dry summer. No perpetrator, no decision, no responsibility.
In the current news:
The Israeli army bombed a refugee camp, killing hundreds of civilians. Clear (and deeply distressing).
Hundreds of people were killed in bombings at a refugee camp in Gaza.
Dozens more dead in Gaza. No army, no bombs, no decision. People fell as leaves fall.
The conflict in the Middle East claims victims once again. — Two parties, one abstract conflict7.
Is the bridge feminine or masculine? It matters.
The effect of language on thought does not stop at violence and blame. Boroditsky also investigated the influence of grammatical gender—the property of many languages that assigns every noun a gender.
Take the word bridge. In German, die Brücke is feminine. In Spanish, el puente is masculine. When Boroditsky asked German speakers to describe a bridge, they more often chose words like “beautiful,” “elegant,” and “slender”—words typically associated with feminine qualities. Spanish speakers more often chose “strong,” “sturdy,” and “towering”—words generally associated with masculine qualities. The same bridge. Different grammatical gender. Different image.
A comparable pattern emerges with the word key: in Spanish, it's feminine (la llave); in German, masculine (der Schlüssel). German speakers described keys as hard, heavy, and metallic; Spanish speakers as small, glittering, and handy. The grammatical gender of a word colors the associations people attach to it, without their being aware of this at all.
This means that the language you speak partly determines how the world around you feels, which properties catch your eye, and which qualities you attribute to the things you encounter. And if that is already true for bridges and keys, it is probably also true for words like “victim” or “perpetrator.”
Seven Thousand Ways of Standing in Reality
Boroditsky’s research indicates that these are not fringe phenomena. Language determines how people orient themselves in space, how they visualize time, how they distinguish colors, how they understand numbers—and even whether abstract mathematics is thinkable at all. The Kuuk Thaayorre, an indigenous people living in northeastern Australia, have no words for “left” and “right” and use only the cardinal directions. They consistently prove better at spatial orientation than people from Western cultures, even in unfamiliar landscapes. A five-year-old child from this community knows exactly where north is. The averagely brilliant university student from Europe or America has no idea.
There are approximately seven thousand languages in the world. Those are seven thousand ways of standing in reality, of naming and experiencing it. Boroditsky calls this the beauty of linguistic diversity: it shows how inventive and flexible the human mind is. But it has a shadow side—we lose roughly one language every week, and with each language, a unique way of looking at the world disappears.
As you have read, Boroditsky demonstrated that language determines what we remember, whom we blame, and whom we punish. If a generation grows up on reporting in which Palestinian deaths fall grammatically from nowhere, while Israeli deaths always have a perpetrator, that shapes a worldview. It becomes a form of cultural programming with the hallmarks of propaganda—but unintentional, carried by words and sentences that seemed neutral.
Grammar does not only decide who is the perpetrator and who is the victim. It decides, subtly and stubbornly, whom we see as a full human being and whom we see as someone to whom an event happens.
The Illusion of Neutrality
Journalists, editors, and editors-in-chief will say that they report neutrally. That they present facts and do not judge. That they take no sides. But what linguistics shows us is that grammatical neutrality does not exist. Every sentence is a choice. Who stands at the front, who at the back, and who disappears? These are not stylistic preferences—they are political decisions, even when they are made unconsciously.
An editor who writes “cyclist hit” is not choosing neutrality. He is choosing a formulation that removes the motorist from view. A reporter who writes “there was an inappropriate situation” is not choosing care and caution. He is choosing a formulation that erases the power dynamic. A history book that writes “Indonesia experienced a colonial period” is not choosing objectivity. It is choosing a perspective in which the colonizer may remain invisible.
The French philosopher Roland Barthes called this mechanism mythologization: the way in which cultural and political choices are disguised as natural, self-evident facts. No conscious choice is made anymore—who stands at the front of the sentence, who vanishes, which word is chosen—and the resulting habit partly shapes our reality. Language pretends to describe how things simply are. And that is precisely the moment at which it is most dangerous: not when language lies, but when it sounds so self-evident that nobody asks whether it could have been otherwise.
Language or Grammar?
The distinction between these two matters, because grammar8 typically works less consciously than word choice. You notice immediately when someone uses a loaded word—victim, terrorist, illegal. Words carry their charge audibly. You can point to words, challenge them, and replace them. But when a sentence is constructed in the passive, it slides in the way a familiar proverb does: unquestioned, with the authority of the obvious. Nobody protests against a passive sentence. No editor marks it as tendentious. No reader feels resistance. And quietly the sentence does its insidious work.
That is also what makes grammar so effective as a political instrument: it operates below the radar of conscious judgment. We are trained to attend to what is said. We are barely trained to notice how the sentence is constructed—who is named first, who comes last, and who has been silently omitted. That becomes simply ‘the way things are normally written.’
Boroditsky’s research indicates that this is not an innocent phenomenon. Test subjects given an identical description of the same event—the only difference being sentence construction, active or passive—arrived at different judgments about guilt and responsibility. They had the same facts but different grammar. And that grammar steered their thinking, without their noticing.
That is the strange and unsettling quality of grammatical influence: it leaves no traces in memory. You remember the conclusion—it was an accident, it was a conflict, it was a tragic situation—but not the sentence that led you there. Grammar has done its work and vanished. What remains is a thought that feels like your own conviction.
Media as Mirror and Mould
Media do not simply report on reality—they partly shape how we understand it. When news media write year after year about women who are abused, cyclists who are hit, and communities that have been plundered, this gradually seeps into how readers perceive the world. It is probably not deliberate manipulation but a slow sedimentation of a particular worldview: a world in which things happen, in which things befall people, and in which responsibility is a diffuse and elusive concept.
Boroditsky’s research strongly suggests that language does not only describe what we think—it partly determines what we are capable of thinking. Someone who never hears or reads sentences in which a perpetrator appears as an acting subject will find it harder to develop the cognitive framework to see agency clearly at all. Grammar shapes thought, and thought shapes what we consider just, normal, or inevitable.
That is what makes the choice between active and passive language not merely a stylistic matter, but an ethical one. Anyone who writes, teaches, reports, or publishes—and in an age when everyone has a blog, that is all of us—is constantly faced with the question: who do I place at the front of the sentence? Who do I let disappear? And what reality do I create in doing so, sentence by sentence, day after day?
See for Yourself
Journalists who have understood this:
Jackson Katz, TEDxFiDiWomen, “Violence against women — it’s a men’s issue”
Lera Boroditsky, TED2018, “How language shapes the way we think”
If you found this article worth reading and (not yet) feel like getting a paid subscription, you can always treat me to a cappuccino!
1 Julia Penelope, Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues (1990).
2 The grammar of non-agency thus describes the full range of linguistic mechanisms by which the capacity to act [= someone doing something] disappears from a sentence.
3 In an active sentence, the grammatical subject is the acting person: The motorist hit the cyclist. The order is logical and transparent — who did what to whom. In a passive sentence, the object is moved to the front while the acting person is pushed to the back or disappears from the sentence entirely: The cyclist was hit by the motorist, or further still: The cyclist was hit. In English, the passive is formed with a form of to be plus a past participle. Passive sentences are not inherently wrong: sometimes the acting person is unknown, unimportant, or the emphasis is deliberately on what happened to someone. But as this article shows, the choice between active and passive always affects who is visible and who is not — and therefore who we hold responsible.
4 I am curious whether anyone can show me an example of ‘Motorist hits cyclist’ in a newspaper or on a news website.
5 Another journalist well worth following is Fréderike Geerdink. Her essay “All Journalism Is Activism” is highly recommended.
6 “Plundered” is not rhetorical exaggeration; it describes an economic model of exploitation deliberately designed to channel wealth from the colony to the mother country, at the expense of the local population.
7 Compare this with how those same media report on violence from the Palestinian side: Hamas killed, Hamas fired, Hamas abducted. Always an acting subject. Always a perpetrator in the sentence. The asymmetry is systematic and consistent — and that is no coincidence, because coincidence does not produce patterns that hold for decades. Language does something here that goes beyond concealing agency. It dehumanises in two ways simultaneously. Palestinian deaths fall — a verb without a cause, without a responsible party, almost meteorological. Palestinian survivors shelter, flee, are struck — passive, motionless, objects of forces greater than themselves. They are never the subject of their own history. They endure it. This is precisely what Penelope described: the grammatical promotion that is in fact a trap. Gaza “experiences a conflict.” Gazans “are displaced.” They have been given a label — refugee, victim, human shield — while the acting party that made them so has been pushed ever further to the edge of the sentence, and ultimately disappeared from it altogether.
8 Grammar is the system of rules and principles for writing, speaking and understanding a language.
Julia Penelope, Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues (1990).
The grammar of non-agency thus describes the full range of linguistic mechanisms by which the capacity to act [= someone doing something] disappears from a sentence.
In an active sentence, the grammatical subject is the acting person: The motorist hit the cyclist. The order is logical and transparent—who did what to whom. In a passive sentence, the object is moved to the front while the acting person is pushed to the back or disappears from the sentence entirely: The cyclist was hit by the motorist, or further still, the cyclist was hit. In English, the passive is formed with a form of to be plus a past participle. Passive sentences are not inherently wrong: sometimes the acting person is unknown, unimportant, or the emphasis is deliberately on what happened to someone. But as this article shows, the choice between active and passive always affects who is visible and who is not—and therefore who we hold responsible.
I am curious whether anyone can show me an example of ‘Motorist hits cyclist’ in a newspaper or on a news website.
Another journalist well worth following is Fréderike Geerdink. Her essay “All Journalism Is Activism” is highly recommended.
“Plundered” is not rhetorical exaggeration; it describes an economic model of exploitation deliberately designed to channel wealth from the colony to the mother country, at the expense of the local population.
Compare this with how those same media report on violence from the Palestinian side: Hamas killed, Hamas fired, Hamas abducted. Always an acting subject. Always a perpetrator in the sentence. The asymmetry is systematic and consistent—and that is no coincidence, because coincidence does not produce patterns that hold for decades. Language does something here that goes beyond concealing agency. It dehumanizes in two ways simultaneously. Palestinian deaths fall—a verb without a cause, without a responsible party, almost meteorological. Palestinian survivors shelter, flee, and are struck—passive, motionless objects of forces greater than themselves. They are never the subject of their own history. They endure it. This is precisely what Penelope described: the grammatical promotion that is in fact a trap. Gaza “experiences a conflict.” Gazans “are displaced.” They have been given a label—refugee, victim, or human shield—while the acting party that made them so has been pushed ever further to the edge of the sentence and ultimately disappeared from it altogether.
Grammar is the system of rules and principles for writing, speaking and understanding a language.