attempted exercise in political power to shape the language and outcomes of our politics.
Manipulating language doesn't really work tho', because everyone understands what's really meant. As an example we all actually know that a "full stack engineer" is just a webdev, and a "senior" one probably only has 2 years experience.
I mean back in the days of client-server, you would have developers do a GUI in Delphi or Visual Basic and also write the SQL to run on the server, and noone ever bragged about being "full stack" back then, it was just a normal part of the job. In the early days of the web the same people would write the HTML and the Perl CGIs and no-one ever used the term "full stack". I was there.
It's baffling why people even try these tricks because they're so transparent and in fact only hurt their own credibility.
It does and it doesn't. Framing can be extremely effective in politics: "collateral damage", "entitlements" etc. There can also be reclaiming efforts on specific words e.g. "queer". But in the other direction the euphemism treadmill can turn terms intended to be neutral into slurs - "retarded" is possibly the most conspicuous example.
Manipulating language doesn't really work tho', because everyone understands what's really meant. As an example we all actually know that a "full stack engineer" is just a webdev, and a "senior" one probably only has 2 years experience.
I mean back in the days of client-server, you would have developers do a GUI in Delphi or Visual Basic and also write the SQL to run on the server, and noone ever bragged about being "full stack" back then, it was just a normal part of the job. In the early days of the web the same people would write the HTML and the Perl CGIs and no-one ever used the term "full stack". I was there.
It's baffling why people even try these tricks because they're so transparent and in fact only hurt their own credibility.