words matter

important to work with members of the public to coin words, rather than dreaming up new vocabulary on their own

Chat” evokes what search engines and databases cannot: a sense of personal involvement. It implicates one’s selfhood, which helps cultivate certain behaviors

Everything that is spoken and can be spoken is merely a figurative term we use to nominate the unnamable, an inventory of “metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms” that we have mistaken for the real and fixed. All we have is language and we cannot get beyond it.

The transformation of “gatekeeping” is, altogether, relatively benign, if not a little frustrating. But many of these linguistic changes create actual harm, especially as many of our watered-down words relate to identifying and challenging power.

To make diagnosis something ‘empowering’, the first step is to completely break it apart and acknowledge all of its potential different and conflicting functions. Diagnosis can give you access to community, or cut you off from community. It can give you access to benefits, or it can bar you from income through employment. It could get you your meds

That final clarification is important. It is to say that language doesn’t simply allow us to describe reality as we experience it. Rather, it actively constitutes those experiences — it brings into being the everyday world for us: a world of tables and chairs, cats and dogs, planets, Great Aunt Jemima, and so on.

Language is more durable than content. Words outlive their definitions.

“Linguistically, a duvet day feels gentle and generous, while rotting in bed conjures up a sense of decay, of life collapsing in on itself. Bed rotting doesn’t shy away from the sticky experience of staying in the same clothes all day or the lethargy that can come from lying down for hours on end.”

The grossness is the point — because, as O’Sullivan