Re-reading your post, it looks like you’re mostly objecting to people feigning ignorance when a word they don’t like comes up, which I agree is an annoying thing to do. I’m curious about whether you also object to people saying things like:
“Incel is a horrible word; it conflates ‘men who are sad about not having any sex’ with ‘misogynistic and violent men’. I worry that its popularity will influence people to be more hostile towards any man who complains about romantic loneliness.”
“I dislike rationlists’ usage of ‘defect’, it’s seemed to have broadened to the point of meaning ‘any behavior I dislike or think is wrong’. I wish we’d all just agree to taboo that word and specify exactly what we’re objecting to instead.”
I think those examples are fine in many possible contexts. You can make a blog post with either instance as content just fine. My objection would come up if someone said “incel” and you said it was a horrible word instead of responding to their statement about incels—make that suggestion at another time. You could, if genuinely puzzled, ask if they mean incels as in lonely or incels as in violent misogynists, but I think context will tend to make that clear. And where it doesn’t they don’t in fact mean one of those things—they mean the conflation, and the word communicated that!
Re-reading your post, it looks like you’re mostly objecting to people feigning ignorance when a word they don’t like comes up, which I agree is an annoying thing to do. I’m curious about whether you also object to people saying things like:
“Incel is a horrible word; it conflates ‘men who are sad about not having any sex’ with ‘misogynistic and violent men’. I worry that its popularity will influence people to be more hostile towards any man who complains about romantic loneliness.”
“I dislike rationlists’ usage of ‘defect’, it’s seemed to have broadened to the point of meaning ‘any behavior I dislike or think is wrong’. I wish we’d all just agree to taboo that word and specify exactly what we’re objecting to instead.”
I think those examples are fine in many possible contexts. You can make a blog post with either instance as content just fine. My objection would come up if someone said “incel” and you said it was a horrible word instead of responding to their statement about incels—make that suggestion at another time. You could, if genuinely puzzled, ask if they mean incels as in lonely or incels as in violent misogynists, but I think context will tend to make that clear. And where it doesn’t they don’t in fact mean one of those things—they mean the conflation, and the word communicated that!