> Artificial means made by people. Language is always made by people. Artificial in language, to me, means "made by decisions" vs "made by accident". Some thin

> Artificial means made by people. Language is always made by people. Artificial in language, to me, means "made by decisions" vs "made by accident". Some things evolve because plenty of individual people see the value and use them in a new way, other things get forced into language because some people see the value of framing issues in a certain way. To me, the former is natural progression of language while the latter is artificial. Much like you can have traditions and religions be created over time in a region or population, that's quite natural. If an army comes and forces them to adopt different traditions and religions, those are artificially implanted. That Peta isn't able to push some term doesn't mean that there's no term-pushing happening or that it's not successful. Framing is a popular tactic. > The key point about the word "sustainability" though, is that it does mean "environmentally friendly." But it really doesn't. Sustainability is quite literally (!) the ability to sustain. Environmentally friendly is very vague and can mean lots of things to lots of people. Factory farming is very sustainable on its own, but it's not environmentally friendly. Sustainability is generally not used as a synonym for environmentally friendly neither, otherwise we wouldn't talk about environmentally sustainable policies, we'd just talk about sustainable policies - but that would be confusing, because there are also economically sustainability issues that have nothing to do with the environment, as are plenty of others, e.g. manually sorting each letter in a country can be done, but it can't be done sustainably. > The purpose of the argument is not to argue about words, but to take a conversation into the weeds. My reaction is the opposite. When someone claims that there's a "white genocide", I disagree and generally discount their argument because it's not strong enough to stand on it's own and therefore they mix in the word "genocide" to create an emotional impact. Pointing that out isn't about derailing the conversation, it's about keeping a minimum level of honesty in communication. Don't use words while massively changing their meaning to advance your agenda, don't do silly card tricks to win an argument by confusing the audience. It's important to insist on it, otherwise you get what Trump has demonstrated quite nicely: if language has no shared meaning any more, the person who says the most outrageous things, delivers the best zingers, talks the loudest or makes the most expressive faces wins every argument because he'll go "they murdered that guy", reap the effect of making people believe somebody was murdered, and when confronted "well, I used murdered in a modern meaning". > To be triggered by the term sustainable, you usually need to really disagree with the implication. In this case, that we should protect oceanic ecosystem protections from commercial fishing more. No. To be against torture of terrorists, you don't need to be pro-terrorism, you just need to be anti-torture. That is, unless all those words have been assigned random new meanings, then it may very well be true.