Gotcha. I think this text that you wrote is really ambiguous:
I mostly don’t really know what this means? I think it means “if I told someone that I did X, I would feel a bit embarassed.”
It’s ambiguous between you not having an explicit understanding of what the meaning of the words are, versus you not understanding what the person you’re speaking with is intending to convey (and the first meaning is IMO the more natural one).
I think having good norms around tabooing words is tricky. In this case, my sense is that some people are using the word in a relatively meaningless way that is actively unhelpful, but also that some people are using the word to mean something quite important, and it’s not great to remove the word for the second group. I think if you want to move toward people not using the word, you will get more buy-in if you include a proposed alternative for the second group, and in the absence there should mostly be a move toward “regularly ask someone to taboo the word” so that you can distinguish between the two kinds of uses.
Gotcha. I think this text that you wrote is really ambiguous:
It’s ambiguous between you not having an explicit understanding of what the meaning of the words are, versus you not understanding what the person you’re speaking with is intending to convey (and the first meaning is IMO the more natural one).
I think having good norms around tabooing words is tricky. In this case, my sense is that some people are using the word in a relatively meaningless way that is actively unhelpful, but also that some people are using the word to mean something quite important, and it’s not great to remove the word for the second group. I think if you want to move toward people not using the word, you will get more buy-in if you include a proposed alternative for the second group, and in the absence there should mostly be a move toward “regularly ask someone to taboo the word” so that you can distinguish between the two kinds of uses.