I get it. I also get annoyed by the weight those words get assigned. Same with ourselves words on television or, God forbid, “nigger”… I’m probably sounding like a racist right now to soemone, just for that word.but it shouldn’t be like that. They’re just words.

I am not raised in that culture of “fear for words” and I cannot understand it,but I have learned to stay far away from it,because the people who do have an opinion on those words are very loud and very clear.

I have also learned that words do not mean the same to different people. Even words without that “weight”. For instance a mental image of an “island”. I think of a tropic island with a single palm tree. You might think of a rocky island. Someone else might think of Shetland. It depends a lot on you context, for instance if you grew up watching The Loveboat or Game Of Thrones.Or maybe you actually grew up on an island. That doesn’t just happen for “island”, but pretty much every word. Fortunately we have a very extensive common context in which we can find common ground to communicate meaning.

You can also see this in language. For instance how people speak regional dialects or how the Eskimo languages have so many words for snow or how calligraphy has influenced Japanese writing or Silbo Gomero

Sure I get that, I run into that a bit also when talking about how kids are basically a modern day slave class legally speaking in the US. I think that’s probably because slave can mean 2 things, 1 being an umbrella term for “worker with freedoms removed and who is not earning capital or power,” and 1 being a specific term for US antebellum slavery which looked quite different from other forms of slavery.

The second use of the term is why people are being really pedantic imo. Because a lot of minimizing has been done to say that black slaves back then didn’t have it so bad, or that they had the same deal as the Irish who were indentured servants. It’s a really common white supremacist talking point in the south that typically leads to their point that black people are actually inferior because every race has dealt with slavery but they are behind because they suck etc. Typical racist garbage, because they want black people to be slaves again and are openly advocating for it with their rhetoric.

So yes ‘slave’ has a charged meaning. Similar to how pitbull can mean “short-haired medium to large sized terriers including staffordshires, bullys, dogs argentinos, American pitbull terriers,” or pitbull can just mean American Pitbull Terrier. I try to emphasize mean the general term when I say “a type of slave class,” or “a form of slavery.”