[StackRanker3000]

This is an instance where semantics are nothing more than, well, semantics.

The people who say that Trump has been ”convicted but not sentenced” actually mean that he’s been ”found guilty but not sentenced”, they just aren’t intimately familiar with legal terms of art.

If they simply say ”Donald Trump was found guilty but not sentenced” instead, they’ve silenced the nitpickers while still conveying the exact same message they intended to in the first place.

[claytongulick]

> This is an instance where semantics are nothing more than, well, semantics.

I'm hard pressed to think of an example of a fact that your statement wouldn't apply to.

[StackRanker3000]

Sometimes when people complain ”you’re just arguing semantics!”, the semantics do in fact need to be cleared up, because the words being used are confusing, or wrong in a way that’s preventing participants in the discussion from getting on the same page.

Here, no one is actually confused. Everyone knows and agrees that Trump was found guilty, but that he hasn’t been sentenced. The only sticking point is whether you can use the word ”convicted” to describe someone who is in that situation, and whether or not that’s the case doesn’t have any material effect on people’s understanding of reality. It’s just a matter of arguing over which words should be used, i.e. it’s just semantics.