E1: The Taboo-the-Word Move

Is it censorship?

In a group chat, a well-known writer has been dropped by a publisher after a public outcry. Someone posts: "This is censorship." Someone else replies that it is not censorship at all, because the government had nothing to do with it. Within an hour there are forty messages, all about the word.

Nobody asked whether the publisher was right, or whether outcries like this make people afraid to publish. The two sides might disagree about both questions, or neither. They spent the hour fighting over the label.

If you were in that chat, you probably knew which answer was correct. Would you have given the same answer if the writer had been on the other side of the political fence, and the outcry had come from yours?

The move

The Taboo-the-Word Move is a tool, which Hardly Thinking defines as a mental operation you can run on a claim in real time, before you believe it or pass it on. It applies when an argument has become a fight over which word fits: whether something counts as censorship, violence, natural, extremist, racist, a ban, a cult. The tool bans the contested word for the length of the conversation and makes every side say what it means in substance, without it.

Running it takes four steps.

1. Find the word the argument keeps returning to, the one each side is trying to win.
2. Set it aside. Nobody may use it, or any close synonym, until the exercise is over.
3. Restate each side's claim in plain terms: what happened, what each side thinks should happen, and why.
4. Compare the restatements. Is there still a disagreement? If so, what exactly is it about?

The fourth step decides the outcome. Sometimes the disagreement vanishes, because both sides turn out to agree on the facts and on what should be done and were only fighting over the label. More often a smaller, sharper disagreement remains, one people can discuss.

Why it works

Many arguments are entirely about which definition of a word applies. A contested word works like a container. Each side has filled it with a different meaning, and each side's meaning carries a verdict. If "censorship" means any pressure that stops someone from speaking, the publisher censored. If it means only government punishment for speech, it did not. Each side is right by its own definition, which is why neither can persuade the other.

Banning the word forces the contents out where they can be examined. It also strips away the judgment the word carries, so that winning the right to use it no longer feels like winning the argument.

The tool belongs to the family Hardly Thinking calls Language Precision, whose subject is language as power, handled carefully. It does not claim that words are unimportant or that every dispute about language is "just semantics." Labels can carry legal, social and moral consequences, and sometimes the fight over the word is a fight over those consequences. The tool separates the two, so that the substance and the label can each be argued on its own terms.

The name comes from the party game Taboo, in which a player must get a partner to guess a word without saying it or five related words on the card. The artificial-intelligence writer Eliezer Yudkowsky described the technique and gave it the game's name in "Taboo Your Words," an essay dated February 15, 2008, and now hosted on the community blog LessWrong. In his example, two people disagree over whether a tree falling in an empty forest makes a sound. One means acoustic vibrations, and the other means someone hearing them. Once each says so, Yudkowsky wrote, "there is no longer an apparent collision—all they had to do was prohibit themselves from using the word sound."

A Pew Research Center survey shows that a label can change answers about the same thing. In July 2005, Pew asked half its sample about making it legal for doctors to "give terminally ill patients the means to end their lives," and 51 percent were in favor. Asked about letting doctors "assist terminally ill patients in committing suicide," 44 percent of the other half were in favor. The finding shows that a word can move a judgment, not that setting it aside settles a dispute. HT has not found a study that tests the move itself.

An older idea describes the weaponized form. In "Persuasive Definitions," a 1938 essay reprinted in 1963, the philosopher C. L. Stevenson described a definition "which gives a new conceptual meaning to a familiar word without substantially changing its emotive meaning, and which is used with the conscious or unconscious purpose of changing, by this means, the direction of people's interests."

Using it well

The legitimate use is temporarily banning a loaded word and restating every side's claims in plain terms to see if a real disagreement remains.

A closed-door congressional interview on January 8, 2024, shows something close to the move, and its limits. Staff of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, then under a Republican majority, questioned Anthony Fauci, who had directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022. At issue was whether work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, funded through his institute's grant to EcoHealth Alliance, counted as "gain-of-function research."

The Democratic minority's chief counsel began by splitting the phrase into three senses: a "layman's definition," a 2014 federal moratorium, and a 2017 federal review framework, known as P3CO, for research expected to create or enhance a pathogen that could cause a pandemic. The broad sense came from a document that Mitch Benzine, the subcommittee's Republican staff director, later identified as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) web page, online until at least October 2021. There the term "describes a type of research that modifies a biological agent so that it confers new or enhanced activity to that agent."

At a Senate hearing on May 11, 2021, Fauci had told Sen. Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, that the NIH had not funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan. In the interview, Fauci said he had meant the P3CO sense. "I don't use the terminology 'gain-of-function' because it can be very confusing," he said. Benzine agreed on the narrow point, as he had twice before: "I'm entirely willing to stipulate that and stipulate that it didn't need to go through the P3CO ..." He added that two senior NIH officials, Lawrence Tabak and Hugh Auchincloss, had said the work met the broad definition.

In the room, what remained was smaller: whether Fauci should have said in 2021 which meaning he intended. Fauci said why he would not answer yes to the broad definition: "Because then, if I say yes, then, 'Ah, yes, he says it was gain-of-function.'" The word carried a verdict that neither definition did.

The narrowing did not outlast the interview. When the subcommittee's Republican majority released the transcript on May 31, 2024, its statement said Fauci "repeatedly played semantics with the definition of 'gain-of-function' research in an effort to avoid conceding" that the agency had funded "this dangerous research in China." On that reading, the narrow definition was the one with the conclusion built in. Whether Fauci's 2021 answer was misleading is disputed, and HT takes no position on it, or on how the COVID-19 pandemic began, which remained unresolved as of October 2026. Strictly, the interview shows a near relation of the tool: both sides kept the word and argued over which definition applied, where the tool sets the word aside altogether.

When it becomes a weapon

The weaponized form is proposing a "neutral" redefinition that has the conclusion already built into it.

It looks like the honest move, because it seems to clear up what the word means. In the two cases below, each speaker presents a definition as the word's plain meaning, and the definition settles the argument before it starts.

The American argument over "amnesty" for immigrants living in the country illegally shows the move from both directions. On April 19, 2007, Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations at NumbersUSA, an advocacy group that seeks to reduce immigration, defined the word for a House Judiciary subcommittee: "Amnesty is pardoning immigration lawbreakers and rewarding them with the objective of their crimes. Any legislation that rewards illegal aliens who came here for jobs by giving them a work permit is amnesty." By that definition, no plan that let them work legally could escape the word, whatever fine or back taxes it required. Later in the hearing she stated the claim underneath: "we are not opposed to amnesty because it is the word 'amnesty.' We are opposed to it because of the message it sends and results that it has." The definition answered that claim before any evidence was heard.

On November 20, 2014, President Barack Obama, a Democrat, redefined the word the other way. Announcing that some immigrants could apply to stay temporarily without fear of deportation, he said: "I know some of the critics of this action call it amnesty. Well, it's not. Amnesty is the immigration system we have today—millions of people who live here without paying their taxes or playing by the rules ..." His plain description of the policy needed no redefinition: "All we're saying is we're not going to deport you."

Three signs tell them apart:

• The honest use bans the word for everyone and replaces it with plain descriptions. The weapon keeps the word and changes what it means.
• The honest use ends with each side's claim restated in a form that side would accept as fair. The weapon ends with one side's claim restated in a form that side would reject.
• The honest use leaves a disagreement standing, if there is one. The weapon makes one side's position disappear by definition.

Run it on your own side first

• Pick a word your side uses as a verdict. Without using the word, can you say what you mean by it, in a way that someone on the other side would recognize as fair?
• Think of a definition you rely on in an argument you care about. Does your definition happen to make your side right? Would you accept a definition built the same way by the other side?
• In your last argument over a label, did you ever ask what the other person meant by it, or did you assume you already knew?

If you cannot say what you mean without the word, you have not yet said what you mean.

Grammars it works against

A grammar, in HT's usage, is a recurring pattern of argument that turns up across many subjects. HT's map of grammars and tools pairs this tool with two of them.

• G9: Language as Territory. This is the tool's home ground: the map lists it among the first tools for G9. G9 is the fight over which word applies, fought as though it were a fight about the facts. Banning the word separates the two, and it checks both poles: the renamers, who believe the word change does the moral work, and the resisters, who treat every change of language as tyranny.
• G1: Purity and Contamination. Here the tool plays a supporting role. This grammar leans on words like "natural," "real," "traditional" and "toxic." Banning them makes both the person who treats "natural" as proof of goodness and the person who treats it as proof of gullibility say what the label measures.

Articles that use it

• The Fight Over Affordability Is Not a Fight About Prices uses the tool on the 2026 fight between the parties over the word "affordability."

Related tools

• E2: The Operationalization Demand asks what, specifically, would count, and measured how. E1 gets the word out of the way; E2 asks how to measure what is left.
• D3: The Motte-and-Bailey Marker asks whether a claim means its modest version or its ambitious one. Banning a contested word makes sliding between the two harder.
• E4: The Creep Gauge asks how far a word's meaning has moved over time, and whether it still excludes anything. It follows when a word's boundary has been expanding.
• F1: The Crux Finder looks for the specific question a disagreement depends on. It picks up where E1 leaves off.