[6P58r3MXJSLi]

> But telling people they should silently accept to use words rooted in a notion of social dominance, doesn’t seem any better

could be, but...

most words are rooted in a notion of social dominance and only carry a a notion of social dominance when used in the context of expressing social dominance (to oppress or abuse of other people).

words like reign or empire or dictator are absolutely rooted in a notion of social dominance, but we accept that it's completely fine if we use them as a metaphor or as an hyperbole. If someone gets offended, it's their fault.

Some example:

- 2013 was the year in which the reign of Federer at the top of the men's game had supposedly come to an end

- Amazon empire: the rise and reign of Jeff Bezos

- Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, has been called a benevolent dictator for life

[psychoslave]

>most words are rooted in a notion of social dominance

Most, I don’t know really, that would need a lot of statistics, but we can certainly agree that a significant portion of the vocabulary pertaining to social matter do.

>words like reign or empire or dictator are absolutely rooted in a notion of social dominance, but we accept that it's completely fine if we use them as a metaphor or as an hyperbole.

Yes, sure, when the context is appropriate, we totally agree. We might lake enough proper bandwidth with flat text alone to discuss that properly though. :D I’m confident it would be far easier to have a conversation on that topic topic around some drinks and laughs for example.

That said, in all example given here, the connection to the toxic social attitudes are obvious.

Every competition-focused sport is rooted in the parable of imposing one dominance on an other, carrying a supremacist perspective with it. That’s why for example yoga competitions will be controversial, while it tennis is not.

As for the two latter celebrities, they don’t really have a reputation of being paragons of empathy that we can point to and say "if everyone would act like this in its interpersonal relationships, humanity would live in gentle bliss and harmony." To be more precise, I don’t know them personally, this remark is really not about these individuals, but more on pointing that in these specific cases, the matching reputation doesn’t serve well the point of uses in metaphoric or hyperbolic ways.

[6P58r3MXJSLi]

> Most, I don’t know really, that would need a lot of statistics

Believe me.

You wanna know something funny?

The word used in Latin for betrayal (tradunt from which derives tradimento in Italian) at its origins meant "to give, transfer, deliver"

When the Christians came to be, they changed its meaning to something bad because Judas "gave Jesus away".

A simple innocent word has become the quintessence of being an awful person because of a stupid religious myth that also started one of the many persecutions of the Jews.

So beware of changing the meaning of words or advocating for their removal from the public discourse, you'll never know who's gonna be hurt by it.

> the connection to the toxic social attitudes are obvious

the only thing that is obvious is that they are only hyperboles, Amazon is not an Empire, Linus Torvalds is not a dictator and Federer did not actually reign over anything.

I would also argue that Linus has been seen as "benevolent" and I really wanna know from you where the connection to the toxic social attitudes lies when we talk about Federer's reign.

It's obvious to me that the sentence was referring to "the king of mens' tennis" (as a metaphor, do you know what they are?) to celebrate him and not to some literal evil ruler who should be dethroned, with the use of the force if necessary.