This means to define a word a specific way to support a specific argument. As an extreme example, during the holocaust, mass murdering thousands of people wasn’t referred to as mass murder but “the final solution”, although perhaps that is a euphemism. Perhaps we should make an example closer to home.
Happiness means being in a loving relationship. I’m not in a loving relationship, therefore I cannot be happy.
Another example from the research I did for my website. Female sex tourists in Africa meet men in Ghana for sex, but refer to them as “beach boys”, rather than ‘prostitutes’. This is because they’d be uncomfortable with that definition, which is a shame as I think there is nothing wrong with consensual acts either way. I’m only using the illustration of the fallacy. Of course, there are other words for people who engage in this practice, and for men they are derogatory, such as ‘John’, ‘trick’ or ‘monger’.
Perhaps ‘incel’ is another example, which simply means someone who would like a sexual relationship but, for whatever reason, cannot form one. Now imagine if you were writing an article about a lady who had an accident and was left in a wheelchair. She had all this dating fear after her rehabilitation and so ended up single for longer than she wanted to be. The article is written in a positive style, upbeat, about resilience and bouncing back. No journalist would ever refer to her as an incel (although in one way it would be the technically correct term).
A better example, someone making an anti-immigration argument, i.e. why a country shouldn’t let them in. They would likely use terms as, ‘immigrants’, “economic immigrant”, “single men as these words are more likely to carry certain connotations in certain contexts. They wouldn’t be referred to as ‘workers’, or “economic victims”, or “trafficked people”.
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU CALL THINGS
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU CALL ME