I disgress

In my country, a mass marketing politic campaign was launched during elections by the one who has become our president. It was based on overtaking previously existing slogans, headlines and ideas there were already around here. You know how fashion trends always comes back? Except this time they've never even left. A trending political party simply claimed old concepts as if they had just invented them. And people bought in.

Their trick was forced linguistic re-branding. After a lot of talking with somebody who voted for this brain-washing party, I've pinned down which were some of the words being misused. During conversations with him, whenever he mentioned something "socialist", he was talking about something "corrupted." Even major capitalistic companies were, from his perspective, socialists. That is because he considered them corrupt. In his mind, he kept using "socialist" to anything he considered oppressive.

Can you guess how many hours I've spent before being able to understand why he did it, and why he shouldn't do it? What's most interesting is, while breaking down each linguistic barrier between him and I, he became increasingly open to ideas other than his own. Therefore, I've concluded creating differences in a group's language is a way to manipulate their ideas without them ever knowing someone did it on purpose.

Picture a conversation where you and I are talking about these two new dresses we saw the other day. To you, one of them was "yellow" and the other was "blue". To me, one of them was "great looking" (the yellow one), while the other was "ugly". You ask me which one I thought was better. I'd answer it was the one of the left, because it was "blue". But my friend clearly remembered the one on the left being yellow. Now, get this: "blue" is the word I'd use when I'm talking about something "beautiful". Because, in this scenario, I was taught to use it this way, maybe as a slang.

When people think they are using the same vocabulary with the same definitions, but they're really not, things can get aggressive really quickly out of frustration from both ends.

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