Recent discussions reminded me of this experience, so I wanted to share it.

When I was a good Catholic child I remember 1-2 years of constantly hearing a message from any church-related official I encountered. It wasn't every time or every lesson, or every sermon, but it appeared consistently enough that it was a theme for those couple of years. The message was lamenting over the state of society, in which people looked for meaning in buying and owning things, constantly acquiring more useless stuff. Everyone agreed this was bad and sad and crazy that people actually did that. This message was also topical, since it happened in a country that was just starting to reap benefits from the move to a freer market, so it referred to an actual phenomenon.

Oh, and obviously because it was about people finding meaning in material things, this was called "materialism".

Imagine my surprize many years later when I learned what "materialism" actually meant. This seems to me like an act of relatively subtle propaganda, make a huge swath of people associate the word for a philosophical position you don't like with something obviously stupid. I'm not completely sure this was intentional, but the coordination and consistent choice of words makes me very suspicious.

This is why it's sometimes necessary to squabble over meanings of words. In particular when they are being used to distort reality, introduce false equivalences or "taint" words with meanings that shouldn't be associated with them. It's good to always keep discussions closer to being about reality, but for humans perception of reality is very much filtered through words, so they cannot be ignored.

@timorl I find being clear about what word your using and what it means is critical to having any sort of meaningful understanding or a useful stance on any issue. So often I ind peoples words sound poetic, moving, and insightful, but in reality its just because a word is left open to interpritation and everyone fits their own assumption about the word in there. So its really just smoke and mirrors.

I think people do this intentionally this way they can argue in whatever direction they want and "fill in" what the word meant later to suit the argument.