Sorry for the long edit to my comment, I was editing while you posted your comment. Anyway, if your goal wasn’t to go all the way to “people need to be more careful with their words” in this post, then fair enough.
I was thinking a bit more about why Christian might have posted his comment, and why the post (cards on the table) got my hackles up the way it did, and I think it might have to do with the lengths you go to to avoid using any examples. Even though you aren’t trying to argue for the thesis that we should be more careful, because of the way the post was written, you seem to believe that we should be much more careful about this sort of thing than we usually are. (Perhaps you don’t think this; perhaps you think that the level of caution you went to in this post is normal, given that giving examples would be basically optimizing for producing a list of “words that cause harm.” But I think it’s easy to interpret this strategy as implicitly claiming that people should be much more careful than they are, and miss the fact that you aren’t explicitly trying to give a full defense of that thesis in this post.)
That’s a really helpful (and, I think, quite correct) observation. I’m not usually quite so careful as all that. This seemed like something it would be really easy to get wrong.
Yes, I’d agree with all that. My goal was to counter the argument that words can’t cause harm. I keep seeing that argument in the wild.
Thanks for helping to clarify!
Sorry for the long edit to my comment, I was editing while you posted your comment. Anyway, if your goal wasn’t to go all the way to “people need to be more careful with their words” in this post, then fair enough.
I was thinking a bit more about why Christian might have posted his comment, and why the post (cards on the table) got my hackles up the way it did, and I think it might have to do with the lengths you go to to avoid using any examples. Even though you aren’t trying to argue for the thesis that we should be more careful, because of the way the post was written, you seem to believe that we should be much more careful about this sort of thing than we usually are. (Perhaps you don’t think this; perhaps you think that the level of caution you went to in this post is normal, given that giving examples would be basically optimizing for producing a list of “words that cause harm.” But I think it’s easy to interpret this strategy as implicitly claiming that people should be much more careful than they are, and miss the fact that you aren’t explicitly trying to give a full defense of that thesis in this post.)
That’s a really helpful (and, I think, quite correct) observation. I’m not usually quite so careful as all that. This seemed like something it would be really easy to get wrong.