Another day; another assault on an innocent person for the benefit of a YouTube posting. This time, the incident led to the death of grandfather Ekram Haque in front of his 3 year old grand-daughter. The appropriateness of the sentence for the teenagers convicted of this man's manslaughter is a debate for another place. What I'm interested in here is the terminology.
Happy slapping appeared as a term soon after phones gained video technology. Slap your mate while someone's filming it, then have a laugh at their expense as you share the resulting clip. The only happy people were the perpetrators and it was their moniker that stuck; the victims most probably called it something else but those descriptions never got a look in.
Controlling the language around an activity or a behaviour allows people to influence how that activity is seen and makes counter-arguments much more difficult to land. Happy slapping is just a bit of horseplay, isn't it? Only a killjoy would try and put a stop to it. Video mugging would be an altogether more difficult sell.
File-sharing, legal highs, joy-riding: all are the creations of people who want to lay a veneer of inoffensiveness on something that does not deserve it.
So if you can influence the vocabulary of what you do, your competitors and detractors will struggle to make an impression.
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