Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Grant and Martha were rather critical of the self appointed  Rules  Masters  who don’t like foods to be adored, political causes to be campaigned on, etc. (That’s on show of May 20.)

But aren’t there  virtues to the instinct to spot conflations and to insist on distinctions?  -if not because it is a main drive of language itself, then as inward check on our weird and perhaps dark human psyches.

Here’re but a few well worn confused terminologies that no doubt trace to human vagaries, self-centerness, drama-queenness, infantileness:

Battle cancer

Tame Nature

Assault on Mount Everest

Mount Everest  yields  but not before claiming so many lives   (This one is particularly annoying!)

What about  Adore foods ?  Could it be from the same psychic place where you conflate  Loving  a person   with   Eating them alive?  (There should be no doubt that human love has a dark side that we humans have in common with spiders, mantises, and such.  )

I always love it when a restaurant waitress calls me   sweetie-pie,  but deep down it always gets my guards up.  As it should yours too.