>Call them what they are. You're overlooking a phenomenon in living language where people want to label something specific and the existing term is too general

>Call them what they are. You're overlooking a phenomenon in living language where people want to label something specific and the existing term is too general. People want the extra connotations[1] in the more specific term. - too general: "lies" (could mean anything from a child's "fib" about eating a cookie or advertiser's false claims about their product) - more specific: "fake news" (which is a subset of "lies") The "fake news" has extra connotation of transmission via media (news, social websites, etc). If we all decided to always use the word "lies" to describe every variation of lies, we'd end up with cumbersome noun phrases and/or hyphenated combinations. E.g. "social-newsfeed-lies" or "news media for profit lies". Maybe some people really prefer to have the taxonomy of language embedded in the noun phrases (a linguistic form of Hungarian Notation?!?). Consider the wiki page on "fake news"[2]. Should the wiki editors delete that entire page and simply redirect all search queries of "fake news" to the main page titled "Lie"?[3] If so, a shade of meaning that was embedded in the term "fake news" would be lost in the process. (If you move the "fake news" from having it's own separate wiki to a subordinate heading within "Lie" article, that still acknowledges that "fake news" is a term with wide currency.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connotation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connotation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie