I hear what you’re saying, but if I may provide an extreme example… Try wearing a sauvastika in the western world these days and what do you think the response will be? Once a symbol of abundance and prosperity became the most prominent hateful symbol for generations. Decades after the annihilation of Nazi Germany and the swastika is still given their interpretation. I don’t have an answer as to how to prevent this from happening all over again like it is to a lesser degree with vocabulary such as this is describing.

[–] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 18 points 9 months ago

No, that’s not a good example at all. This is closer to Orwell’s Newspeak, in which the government makes a word mean its opposite in order to force a change to the way people think.

A more relevant example is the use of the term “fake news.” The term was originally coined to talk about Trump making up “facts” on the fly that were completely disconnected from reality. Then Trump started using the term to refer to news articles he didn’t like.

He was even asked at one point if by “fake news” he meant the story wasn’t true. He said no - he meant he thinks it’s not something the media should be talking about, true or not.

For his fans and for the media in general, it’s come to mean “false,” but that’s an inversion of the original meaning, which is that Trump was inventing “facts,” mutated to Trump thinking the media shouldn’t be reporting on his extensive dealings with Russians, and finally being interpreted as challenging whether those fully documented and verified meetings even really happened.