Preserving the Union — Label

From John Hood's Daily Journal:

RALEIGH – Words are weapons in politics.

I don’t just mean in the sense that words are a means of conveying rhetoric attacks and defenses, though of course that is true. A chief function of (limited) government, and thus a core element of the birth of any civilization, is to transform conflicts from violent to verbal. Although politicians and activists sometimes forget or obscure the fact, it is important to remember that politics is ultimately about physical force. It seeks to determine under what conditions force should be used to compel people to behave a certain way or to surrender resources to the state to finance a public function.

My point here is more specific: the choice of a particular word can be invested with major political significance. Because our language has a large vocabulary of synonyms and antonyms that bear varying shades of meaning and emotional baggage, the parties to a political dispute have a strong incentive to choose words likely to frame the debate to their advantage – and then to have those words become the standard parlance.