G9: Language as Territory

One mountain, two names

On August 30, 2015, the Obama administration announced that North America's highest peak, called Mount McKinley in federal publications since 1897, would officially be called Denali, the name given to it by the Koyukon Athabascan people. "This name change recognizes the sacred status of Denali to many Alaska Natives," said the Interior Secretary, Sally Jewell. On January 20, 2025, President Trump ordered the name changed back. The 2015 decision, his executive order said, had been "an affront to President McKinley's life, his achievements, and his sacrifice."

Notice which of those two decisions struck you as a matter of respect, and which as political theater.

If you had an answer ready, try a harder test. In 2015 a Democratic congressman from Ohio, Tim Ryan, objected to the change in words that could have been lifted into the 2025 order: "We must retain this national landmark's name in order to honor the legacy of this great American president and patriot" (as reported by CBS News, which took the statement from Fox News, a right-leaning outlet; the original statement was not found). In 2025 a Republican senator from Alaska, Lisa Murkowski, objected to the reversal: the mountain "must continue to be known by the rightful name bestowed by Alaska Koyukon Athabascans" (Alaska Beacon, January 20, 2025). Would your verdict on each decision survive if the two administrations had swapped places?

Now ask what changed. The mountain did not. Whether anything else did is a real question: for Alaska Natives, whose state had asked for the name Denali since 1975, a name in federal use is a form of recognition, and for Ohio politicians of both parties, in McKinley's home state, the old name was one too. That argument, about whom the country honors, can be had openly. But watch how fast it turns into something else. In 2015 Representative Bob Gibbs of Ohio, in the same CBS report, argued first that only Congress could rename the mountain, calling the change a "constitutional overreach." Then he added that the President had renamed it "in order to promote his job-killing war on energy." The President was in Alaska that week for a trip that CBS described as "focused, in part, on environmental issues and the danger posed by climate change." By the end of Gibbs's statement, a mountain's name had become a flag in a fight about energy.

That is this grammar. Its signature is not caring about words, which everyone does and should. It is mistaking the fight over a word for the fight over the thing, and noticing the mistake mainly when the other side makes it.

What the grammar is

Some arguments are entirely about which word applies to something, but are fought as though they were about the facts. Is a hurtful remark "harm," "violence" or "rudeness"? Is a term "inclusive" or "imposed"? Each side behaves as if winning the word would settle the matter. Occasionally it would, because a word can carry consequences with it. Often the facts and the real disagreement are left exactly where they were.

The deep structure is that fights over words are fights over power: whoever gets to name a thing controls what can be thought about it. The grammar takes several familiar forms. The euphemism treadmill is the cycle in which a gentler word replaces a stigmatized one, the stigma catches up, and the word is replaced again. A persuasive definition, in the philosopher C. L. Stevenson's phrase, quietly redefines a word that carries approval or disapproval, so that "real" freedom or "true" patriotism turns out to be whatever one's own side already does. Stevenson stressed the purpose: such a definition is used "with the conscious or unconscious purpose of changing, by this means, the direction of people's interests." "The words are prizes," he wrote, "which each man seeks to bestow on the qualities of his own choice." (Stevenson's essay first appeared in 1938; it is quoted on this page from the 1963 reprint.) Concept creep is the expansion of words for harm until it is hard to say what they exclude. And institutions produce anesthetic language, engineered so that a hard thing sounds administratively neutral and nobody has to picture it.

This site calls a recurring pattern of argument like this a grammar: a shape the same mistake takes across many different subjects, so that once you can see it in one argument you can see it in others. This one has two poles, and each is a real failure.

Pole A, the renamers, believe that changing the word does the moral work. Once the old term is retired, something is thought to have been fixed, whether or not anything has changed for the people the word describes. At their worst, renamers write language guides that make ordinary criticism unsayable, and they mistake compliance for agreement: when people stop using a word in public for fear of the consequences, the renamers take the silence for consensus.

Pole B, the resisters, treat every change in language as tyranny. They refuse updates whose only cost is breaking a habit. At their worst, they develop euphemisms of their own: "politically incorrect," worn as a badge, is a gentle phrase that makes rudeness sound like courage. Resisters are right that some renaming is evasion. They are wrong when they treat all of it that way, and when they fail to notice their own preferred words doing the same work.

Taking the word fight apart

A word fight comes undone when the argument moves off the word and onto what the word was standing in for. A few questions do most of the work.

Can the thing be described in words both sides would accept? Set the contested word aside and describe the situation plainly. "North America's highest peak is in Alaska, and it has had two official names" is accepted by everyone in the Denali argument. What is left over is the real disagreement.

Does anything follow from the word? Sometimes nothing is meant to. In 2010 Congress replaced "mental retardation" with "intellectual disability" in a list of federal education, health and labor laws, and the act itself said it was made "without any intent to" "change the coverage, eligibility, rights, responsibilities, or definitions referred to in the amended provisions." Sometimes a great deal follows. Four years later, in Hall v. Florida, the Supreme Court struck down, by five votes to four, Florida's rule that a prisoner who scored above 70 on an IQ test could not be found intellectually disabled, and so could be executed; the rule, the Court held, "creates an unacceptable risk that persons with intellectual disability will be executed." The name changed and, by the act's own terms, nothing was meant to follow in law; the definition was contested and a life could turn on it. When a word decides who is protected, who pays or who is punished, the fight over it is a fight over consequences and should be conducted openly as one. When nothing follows except a feeling, the fight is about the feeling.

What would count, and how would we check? A word that applies to everything, or to anything its user dislikes, has stopped describing.

What did this word cover before, and what does it cover now? Some expansions track a real discovery that a harm was more common or serious than people had recognized. Others stretch a strong word over weak cases, borrowing its weight while diluting it. The question is whether the word still excludes anything.

Which version of the claim is on the table? "Violence," "censorship" and "propaganda" can each mean something narrow and serious or something broad and ordinary. A speaker may use the broad sense when unchallenged and retreat to the narrow one under pressure.

Asked together, these questions usually show one of three things. The disagreement was about facts, and the word was hiding that. Or it was about values, and the word was hiding that. Or there was no disagreement left, and the word was all there was.

Why it is so persistent

Words are cheap and things are expensive. Changing what a group of people is called costs a style guide. Changing their circumstances costs money, time and political will. When the cheap thing is available and the expensive one is not, the cheap thing comes to stand in for it, for both poles. The renamer gets to feel that something has been done; the resister gets a target easier to fight than the underlying problem.

Words are also chosen as strategy. In 2002 the Republican consultant Frank Luntz wrote a strategy memo on the environment, later obtained and released by the Environmental Working Group, an environmental advocacy organization, and reported by The Guardian in March 2003. "The terminology in the upcoming environmental debate needs refinement," the memo said, and it advised Republicans to say "climate change" rather than "global warming," because "While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge."

Whatever the memo's effect, the two sides did come to favor different terms, though not in the way it urged. In a 2011 study, the psychologists Jonathon Schuldt, Sara Konrath and Norbert Schwarz searched the websites of 26 think tanks in 2010 and found that most conservative ones (9 of 12) used "global warming" more often and most liberal ones (10 of 14) used "climate change." Their explanation was about what the words suggest: "global warming" "entails a directional prediction of rising temperatures that is easily discredited by any cold spell." They also ran a survey experiment, in April to June 2009, on a web panel that they note "is not representative of the American public." When the question said "global warming," 44.0 percent of Republicans gave an answer that at least leaned toward its having happened; when it said "climate change," 60.2 percent did. Democrats barely moved (86.9 and 86.4 percent). On that panel, one word shifted what one side was willing to affirm. The study measured the effect of the wording, not the reasons people had for preferring a word. This site's reading goes one step further: once a word becomes a badge, using or refusing it can work as a signal of loyalty, and an argument about the word can turn into an argument about belonging.

Then there is the treadmill itself. In a 1994 New York Times essay, "The Game of the Name," Steven Pinker wrote: "To a linguist, the phenomenon is familiar: the euphemism treadmill. People invent new 'polite' words to refer to emotionally laden or distasteful things, but the euphemism becomes tainted by association and the new one that must be found acquires its own negative connotations." His conclusion: "concepts, not words, are in charge: give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name." If that is right, renaming alone cannot win, and neither can refusing to rename. Pinker did not draw the resister's conclusion: "Respect means treating people as they wish to be treated, beginning with names. That is why there is a clear need for guidelines."

Finally, harm-words carry moral weight, and moral weight is useful. In a 2016 paper the psychologist Nick Haslam named the pattern concept creep. Tracing the histories of abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction and prejudice, he argued that each concept had expanded in two directions: "outward to capture qualitatively new phenomena and downward to capture quantitatively less extreme phenomena." He argued that the expansion "primarily reflects an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm, reflecting a liberal moral agenda," but did not call it simply good or bad: a balanced view would fall "somewhere between conservative reaction and liberal celebration." Recognizing workplace intimidation as bullying, he wrote, is "an important step towards creating more nurturing workplaces"; but a word can also be emptied: "In extreme situations, the meaning of negative concepts can be almost completely debased, as when people describe their ordinary, transient sadness as 'depression.'"

How the argument has been had before

The fight over words is old, and each round left both sides with something they got right.

"The Forgotten Man." In 1883 the Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner set out the idea in What Social Classes Owe to Each Other: "A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. ... I call C the Forgotten Man." C was the taxpayer, and Sumner gave "any student of social science" a question to carry: "Who and where is the Forgotten Man in this case, who will have to pay for it all?" In 1932 Franklin Roosevelt, in a radio address from Albany, used the phrase for nearly the opposite figure: "the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid," closer to Sumner's D than his C. That was the renamers' move. The foreword to a 1951 reissue of Sumner's book gave the resisters' reply, objecting to "the misappropriation of this title and its application to a character the exact opposite of the one for whom Sumner invented the phrase." Underneath, the two original texts agreed on more than the fight suggests. Sumner counted the tariff against his Forgotten Man: a protected factory, he wrote, "is a heavier load for the Forgotten Men and Women than an iron-clad ship of war in time of peace." Roosevelt attacked the Hawley-Smoot tariff and "pure monopolies which cause us to pay excessive prices for many of the necessities of life." Each, read whole, named a cause and a cure; the later fight was over the phrase. In 2026 the same move returned with "affordability," the subject of Hardly Thinking's article The Fight Over Affordability Is Not a Fight About Prices.

Orwell's examples. George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" (Horizon, April 1946) made the case that political language can be built to make terrible things sound bland. "Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification," he wrote. "Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them." He exempted no party, "from Conservatives to Anarchists," and not himself: "Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against." The essay has sharp critics. Writing in 2009 on Language Log, a blog run by academic linguists, David Beaver argued that Orwell "begins with the unjustified premise that language is in decline." He also pointed out that the essay's first sentence uses the passive voice ("it is generally assumed"), against Orwell's own rule to avoid it, and his point was that the rule was poor advice: "the passive is slightly better here." Orwell was right that a phrase can be designed so that no picture forms; a careful reader should still ask whether a plainer word is always more accurate, or only more vivid.

The "political correctness" fights of the 1990s. At the University of Michigan's commencement on May 4, 1991, President George H. W. Bush gave the resisters' case. The movement, he said, "arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred," but "it replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits." And: "in their own Orwellian way, crusades that demand correct behavior crush diversity in the name of diversity." Three years later Pinker's essay opened with the renamers' side in practice: the Los Angeles Times's new "Guidelines on Racial and Ethnic Identification," which, he reported, "bans or restricts some 150 words and phrases such as 'birth defect,' 'Chinese fire drill,' 'crazy,' ... 'stepchild,' 'WASP' and 'to welsh.'" One side, as he summarized it, held "that vigilance against subtle offense is necessary to eliminate prejudice"; the other saw "a corrosion of clarity and expressiveness at best, and thought control at worst." His criticisms were aimed mainly at the renamers. He asked "why The Los Angeles Times's style panel apparently did not consult those it defends," and warned that people without malice were being "tainted as bigots for innocently using passe terms." But he also told both sides that "words are not thoughts," a point that "should alleviate anxiety on both sides," and he endorsed guidelines in principle. Each side had a point. The renamers were right, by Pinker's own standard, that respect begins with names. The resisters were right that a long list of banned phrases, drawn up without asking the people it was meant to protect, could turn innocent speakers into suspects.

"Collateral damage." The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines the phrase as "during a war, the unintentional deaths and injuries of people who are not soldiers, and damage that is caused to their homes, hospitals, schools, etc." It is accurate in a narrow sense, and it also lets people discuss dead civilians without picturing them. In 1999, after NATO used the term during its bombing campaign in the Kosovo war, the German "Unwort des Jahres" ("non-word of the year"), an annual campaign of language criticism run by a self-appointed jury, not a neutral authority, chose its German form, Kollateralschaden. The jury called it a "Verharmlosung der Tötung Unschuldiger als Nebensächlichkeit," which this site translates as a "playing down of the killing of innocent people as a side matter." In the same entry the jury described the deaths as "die militärischen Verbrechen in diesem nicht erklärten Krieg," "the military crimes in this undeclared war." On this site's reading, that phrase is a contested legal judgment, offered in place of a contested euphemism as if it were the plain description. The same jury had warned against the opposite mistake. In 1995 the largest group of public nominations (153) named the plain words for a parliamentary pay rise, "Diäten" and "Diätenerhöhung." The jury declined them as "eine Verwechslung von Sach- und Sprachkritik," which this site translates as "a confusion of criticism of the thing with criticism of the language," and chose instead the euphemism "Diätenanpassung," a pay "adjustment." The phrase "collateral damage" remains a good test of whether a critic objects to its precision or to its anesthesia.

Each decade's refresh. The treadmill shows clearly in the words for intellectual disability. In 1927 the Supreme Court upheld the forced sterilization of a woman it described as "feeble-minded," in a case known as Buck v. Bell; Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Both words were then the language of law: the Virginia statute spoke of "imbecility," and the institution was the "State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded." Later opinions of the Court used "mental retardation." In Hall v. Florida in 2014 it switched again: "This opinion uses the term 'intellectual disability' to describe the identical phenomenon." The Senate committee that recommended Rosa's Law in 2010 gave the renamers' case in its own words: the terms "have gone through a steady evolution over the past two centuries, each iteration describing those living with the condition in a pejorative way," and the most recent had "developed into colloquial slurs and pejorative phrases used to demean and insult both persons with and without disabilities." That is an argument for changing the word, and it is also, on its own account, a description of Pinker's treadmill: each new term had in turn become an insult. The research for this page found no organized opposition to Rosa's Law; the resisters' point here, that renaming alone does not end stigma, comes from Pinker's general argument, not from anyone who opposed the act. Neither side's word did what Buck v. Bell did; the law did that.

In each round the error was not caring about words. It was believing the word was the whole of the fight.

How each pole fails

The two poles fail in mirror image. The research for this page found clear present-day examples of the renamer's failure on more than one side of politics, but a clear example of the resister's failure only on the right. That gap is reported at the end of this section rather than filled with a weak example.

The renamer treats the new word as the achievement and reads a change in usage as a change of heart. In August 2020 the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan polling organization, reported that "Latinx" was used by "some news and entertainment outlets, corporations, local governments and universities," but that in its December 2019 survey "only 23% of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the term Latinx, and just 3% say they use it to describe themselves." Institutions had adopted a word on behalf of people who mostly did not use it.

By December 2022, a guide written for Stanford University's IT community, the "Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative," set out "to eliminate" harmful language "in Stanford websites and code." Its footnotes softened this: "eliminate" was "a goal to strive for," and how a person wished to be identified "supersedes any of our suggested alternatives." It suggested "US Citizen" in place of "American," because "This term often refers to people from the United States only, thereby insinuating that the US is the most important country in the Americas." The replacement had its own problem: many people living in the United States are not citizens, so "US Citizen" describes a different group. The guide also flagged "beat(ing) a dead horse" because "This expression normalizes violence against animals." Stanford's chief information officer, Steve Gallagher, took the site down on January 4, 2023, saying it had been "intended as a guide, not a mandate," and explaining what had gone wrong in terms this page would recognize: "The initiative's scope of 'racist terminology in technology' was later expanded more broadly as 'harmful language in technology.' It was this expansion in scope that is at the heart of the intense recent feedback." The original target, terms like "master" and "slave" for parts of computer systems, had a specific rationale; the list outgrew it.

Six days later, on January 10, 2023, Arkansas's new governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, signed an executive order "to respect the Latino community by eliminating culturally insensitive words from official use in government." It removed "Latinx" from state documents, citing Pew's 3 percent figure, and declared that "Ethnically insensitive and pejorative language has no place in official government documents or government employee titles." Rejecting a new term looks, on its face, like the resister's move, and the order can be read that way. This page classifies it by its method instead. The order had a factual point, the one Pew had found. But it worked the way the renamers work: an official order removing a word from use, justified in the vocabulary of respect, the mirror of Stanford's guide. The 2025 McKinley order can be read the same way, since it treats restoring a name as itself an act of honor.

The resister makes the opposite moves. Every new term is read as a demand for submission, including ones that cost nothing but a moment's attention. The age of a word is treated as proof of its accuracy, as though the older term were simply neutral when it too was once a choice. And the resister builds a counter-vocabulary whose job is to make one set of word choices sound like the absence of a choice. At the first Republican presidential debate, on August 6, 2015, the moderator Megyn Kelly told Donald Trump that he had called women he did not like "fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals," and went on to ask whether that sounded like "the temperament of a man we should elect as president." When she finished her question, he answered: "I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct," adding, "I don't frankly have time for total political correctness." His answer moved from the particular words to a general style of speech, and treated objection to the words as the problem. It is not the "politically incorrect" badge itself, but it is the same move: naming the objection instead of answering it.

The research for this page found no clear present-day example of the resister's failure on the left: no left-wing counterpart to "politically incorrect," and no left-of-center figure on record treating a change in language as tyranny. The 2015 Ohio objections to Denali came from both parties, but they were about whom a name honors, not about a change in language. That gap may reflect where this site looked rather than where the pattern lives, and the page will be revised if a specimen shows otherwise.

Both poles treat the word as the place where the fight is won, spend their energy there, and leave the underlying question unexamined.

Where it borders other grammars

With G1: Purity and Contamination it shares the label that stands in for evidence. "Natural," "clean" and "toxic" can win an argument about food or medicine before anyone asks about dose or mechanism.

With G3: Sacred Values versus Trade-offs it shares the euphemism that hides a cost. Renaming a hard trade-off so that it sounds administrative is a way of not weighing it out loud.

With G10: Victimhood as Standing it shares the stretching of harm-words. As "harm" or "trauma" expands, more people can claim the standing that comes with being harmed, and the argument over whether that is just becomes an argument over a word.

With G4: Loyalty, Heresy, and Betrayal it shares the shibboleth, the word that marks who belongs. Using the wrong term can be treated as betrayal inside a group, which turns word choice into a loyalty test.

When naming the pattern becomes a weapon

The vocabulary on this page can end an argument as easily as clarify one.

"That's just semantics" is a common weapon. Sometimes it is true, and saying so frees a conversation stalled on a label. But when a definition decides who is protected, who pays or who is punished, as Florida's IQ cutoff did, calling the dispute semantic declares the stakes trivial without examining them. Stevenson made the point with an example. Some nineteenth-century critics, he noted, denied that Alexander Pope was a poet, and he imagined the dismissive answer: "The foolish reply would be, 'it's a mere matter of definition.' It is indeed a matter of definition, but not a 'mere' one."

"Euphemism treadmill" and "Orwellian" can be used to dismiss any new term as relabeling, without asking whether the old term was inaccurate or contemptuous. Bush's 1991 speech, quoted above, called a whole movement "Orwellian" without naming, in that passage, a single word or rule it had changed. "Concept creep" can be used to deny that a specific case is real harm simply because the category has grown. Haslam told the New Statesman, a left-of-center British magazine, in 2022 that he had not intended his paper as a "reactionary provocation"; in the reporter's summary, his work "was championed by the political right, who took it as yet more evidence that leftists were becoming 'liberal snowflakes.'" A word stretched over some weak cases does not make every case it covers weak, and Haslam's own paper counts the wider use of "bullying" as a gain.

The weapons point the other way too. "Dog whistle" can be used to declare that a plain word secretly means something else, in a way no evidence could disprove. "Harmful language" can be used to rule a critical argument out of bounds without answering it. The research for this page did not find a quoted, dated case of either label used to close an argument, so these two sentences describe a risk, not a documented instance. And the critic of a euphemism can put a harsher label in its place, as the German jury did with "military crimes."

Each of these labels names a real failure. None of them settles whether that failure is happening here.

Catching it in yourself

Which new words irritate me, and which old ones do I defend? If the two lists line up neatly with your politics, the irritation is probably tracking the side, not the language.

Did I judge the Denali decision and the McKinley decision by the same rule? If not, which rule was I actually using?

Could I describe the thing without my preferred word, in terms the other side would accept? If you can, check whether you still disagree.

Do I think the word I use is the neutral one? Nearly everyone does. The word your side uses feels like plain description, and the other side's feels like spin.

When did I last feel that something was fixed, or lost, because a word changed? Ask what happened to the people the word described.

What would I lose if I gave up this word? If the answer is "an argument I usually win," the word may be doing work the facts are not.

Tools that help

The first two tools are this grammar's first-line tools; the last two support them.

• E1: The Taboo-the-Word Move. Ban the contested word for the length of the conversation and have every side say what it means in substance. Many fights over terms dissolve when the term is unavailable, and those that survive turn out to be about something real. Its misuse is proposing a "neutral" replacement with your conclusion built in.
• E2: The Operationalization Demand. Ask what, specifically, would count as the word applying, measured how. Asking for a measure usually breaks a sweeping word into smaller questions that can be answered. Its misuse is demanding ever finer definitions to stall a claim you would rather not examine.
• E4: The Creep Gauge. Ask what a word covered twenty years ago, what it covers now, and whether it still excludes anything. This separates expansions that track a real moral discovery from ones that inflate a word until it means little. Its misuse is waving away a specific case because the category has grown.
• D3: The Motte-and-Bailey Marker. Pin down whether a charged word is being used in its modest sense or its ambitious one, and hold the conversation to the one actually in play. (The name is a castle image, explained on the tool's own page.) Its misuse is accusing anyone who uses a word carefully of secretly meaning its most extreme version.

Where it shows up now

As of October 2026, the site has not yet examined this grammar in a live argument. The "Latinx" episode (2019 to 2023) and the Denali and McKinley renamings (2015 and 2025) are discussed above. The rest are places to look, not findings.

• The "Gulf of America." The same January 2025 executive order directed that the Gulf of Mexico "officially be renamed the Gulf of America." Not yet examined.
• Fights over pronouns and the enforcement of terminology. Not yet examined.
• Terms such as "unhoused" and "justice-involved," and whether they are kinder descriptions, a turn of the treadmill, or both. Not yet examined.
• The spread of therapy vocabulary, such as "gaslighting," "narcissist" and "boundaries," into ordinary conflict. Not yet examined.
• The language of layoffs. Not yet examined.
• "Ultra-processed." Whether the term carries more persuasive weight than its research definition supports. Not yet examined; the site has not yet read the research that defines it.
• "AI safety" and "AI ethics." Whether the two labels have come to mark rival camps rather than different questions. Not yet examined; the site has not yet read sources on either community.
• "Loneliness" and "social isolation," used interchangeably, although one is a feeling and the other a measurable condition. Not yet examined.

Related concepts

• Euphemism treadmill. The cycle in which a new, gentler word takes on the stigma of the old one and is replaced in turn, described by Steven Pinker in "The Game of the Name" (New York Times, April 5, 1994).
• Concept creep. The psychologist Nick Haslam's term for the expansion of harm-related concepts, outward to new kinds of case and downward to milder ones, in "Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology" (Psychological Inquiry, 2016).
• Persuasive definition. C. L. Stevenson's term, from a 1938 paper in the journal Mind reprinted in his Facts and Values (1963), for a definition that "gives a new conceptual meaning to a familiar word without substantially changing its emotive meaning." Such definitions, he noted, "are often recognizable from the words 'real' or 'true.'" Quotations on this page are from the 1963 text.
• Essentially contested concepts. The philosopher W. B. Gallie's name, in a 1956 paper to the Aristotelian Society, for concepts such as "art" and "democracy" whose "proper use ... inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users." To use such a concept, he wrote, "means to use it both aggressively and defensively." Where Stevenson describes one side redefining a word, Gallie describes words that every side is bound to contest.
• Framing. The study of how the choice of terms steers what an audience notices and believes. Schuldt, Konrath and Schwarz, in the study described above, write of "the power of terms to frame political issues in ways that promote ideologically consistent attitudes and beliefs," citing among others the linguist George Lakoff. Lakoff's own work was not read for this page.
• Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." George Orwell's 1946 essay on vague and euphemistic political language. Pinker's 1994 essay traces both sides' assumptions about language and thought back to it.
• Precision as respect for the reader. The view that saying exactly what you mean, and no more, treats the reader as able to judge the plain facts.