> When I hear "enslaving"... Where have I ever used the word "exactly", friend? My point was that people intuitively recognize the emotional impact and importa

> When I hear "enslaving"... Where have I ever used the word "exactly", friend? My point was that people intuitively recognize the emotional impact and importance of words like "slavery", and that the commenter was exploiting that well-earned impact to artificially inflate the importance of their comment. > If you hear that... The other side of good communication is expressing yourself in a clear, non-manipulative way instead of playing on people's emotions. > Now you in this conversation... Again there is a difference between understanding the meaning rationally and interpreting the seriousness of a statement intuitively. If I start calling every annoyance I face slavery, then the word will quickly lose most of its meaning and impact, since the dictionary definition is broad enough to apply to an entire range of issues, from tiny to massive. > There is no synonym you'd like... How about just using language that is specific to the issue being discussed? We're talking about a company retaining some personal information, how about we call that a violation of privacy? "Removing one's rights and liberties" as a general statement implies a high bar of seriousness, of significant violations of significant rights. I don't need to call myself a "survivor of human rights abuses" because Google stored some metadata about my shopping habits. I can simply say that my privacy was not being respected. And again, I never made the point that enslaved people may feel offended by a post on Hackernews, I argued that this type of inflationary usage destroys our (as in well-off dudes who have the ability to help people) ability to intuitively judge the seriousness of an issue. It's the same with words like "racism", if we call every guy who sings along to rap music and uses the n-word a racist, then we implicitly support actual racists by compromising the seriousness of the term.