How can you tell if that catchy Facebook meme or bumpersticker slogan is a means to produce change in the world, or just a way to vent your frustration? Here’s one easy test: if adding the words “you idiot” to the end of it sounds natural, it’s venting.

Here’s an example. There’s a busy road I sometimes travel which runs through a residential neighborhood and past two schools. A kid got hit a while back, so there’s reason for concern. Residents have put up yard signs to get drivers to slow down. But are these signs really a good way to slow traffic, or are they a way for residents to voice their frustration with speedy drivers?

Compare the two most popular signs. One says, “Drive like your children live here.” Now, if you say it in exactly the right tone of voice, you can make “Drive like your children live here, you idiot,” sound natural, but you do have to work at it.

On the other hand, “Slow down. This is a residential neighborhood, not a race track, you idiot,” sounds natural with no effort at all.

Why should this matter to the people choosing a sign? Well, how do you react to the unsolicited advice of a stranger who clearly thinks you are an idiot? Right. Unless you are superhumanly patient, you get annoyed and decide that it is the stranger who is the real idiot. And why should you listen to anything that idiot has to say?

Given this fact about human nature, why are there so many Facebook posts and signs that seem intended to change behavior (e.g. drive slowly, wear a mask) but which are phrased in ways almost guaranteed to make them unproductive? The answer, I guess, is that these posts are also very clever and entertaining to the people posting them and their friends. And it just feels satisfying to tell people what you really think of them.

But if you actually want to accomplish something–get drivers to slow down, say–then telling people you think they are idiots is at best useless and at worst counterproductive. How many drivers, I wonder, saw the racetrack sign and speeded up, just to annoy the person who’d put it there?

So before you put up that sign or post that meme, try adding “you idiot” to the end and see if it sounds natural. Then decide whether your goal is to produce change, or to vent your frustrations in a clever turn of phrase.

Till next post.

P.S. When I looked the sign up online, I found it labeled “Funny caution sign.” So maybe that’s how the people who put it up viewed it–a gently humorous way to say “Slow down.” But I can attest to the fact that it did not come across that way when I saw it, a sad illustration of the gap that can exist between our intentions with words and the way they are actually received.