If your mind jumps to sexual predation whenever you hear the word grooming, you have bigger problems than word choice at work. Do you think these people have these little breakdowns when they see "Grooming products" on a sign at Target, or do they reserve their energy solely for office politics power plays?
You think there's a list of words that shouldn't be used in these contexts. Your list overlaps with their list in a large number of cases. You just disagree with a few of the words where your lists don't overlap. It's not exactly a big deal.
This is sophistry. Of course no one disagrees word choice matters. The quibbles over which words are the entire ballgame. "We all agree words matter, we just disagree about which ones" is true in the same way that "we all agree policy matters, we just disagree about which policies" is true. Yeah! That's what political disagreements are! Collapsing a disagreement on principles into a disagreement over degree is basically changing the venue of the argument.
Ok, I'm we glad agree on the concept/system, the parent post sure seemed like it was disagreeing with it.
I don't personally have a strong opinion on the word grooming, although on reflection it seems like the majority of times I see the word is in a sexual context these days.
There is a clear difference between not calling your coworker a slur, which is about prejudice or hatred, and not saying words like 'grooming', which is about whether the least reasonable person you know could plausibly find a negative usage of the word and claim it "traumatized" them to hear.
"Don't use words that dehumanize people" and "don't use words that have some negative connotation, somewhere out there" are meaningfully different systems, and I don't want to work with people tedious enough to adopt the latter. I don't want them to set the corporate or academic culture of our society.
