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Comment by bseidensticker | Hacker News Reader

I don't think "toxic" means "irredeemably harmful". It just means harmful and makes no judgement on intent.

It's more than harmful—prior to the latest common usage, toxic usually meant potentially lethal for sufficient dosage.

So, while it is indeed free of connotations of intent, it evokes disgust and, in fact, invites ostracism. If something is so dangerous that it can kill you, there's rarely much wisdom in attempting to talk it out of being lethal. Better to just remove it from your environment.

In any case, I agree that the word is tragically overworked. And don't we all know that overwork can be toxic.

uh ok, sounds like you've thought about this a lot.

I just meant to say that *to me*, toxic doesn't imply irredeemable. It's just a popular word for harmful.

That may be an accurate technical meaning but lay people still just meant "harmful" well before it started being applied to behavior.

Everything is potentially lethal given a sufficient dosage.

So really I think "toxic" is appropriate.

So what you're saying is... Toxic is being toxically overused?

I understand it to be harmful, but in a way that contaminates the environment around it. A bad colleague can be a dick, in isolation, whereas a toxic colleague would be someone whose behaviours poisons their surrounds and brings out bad behavior in other people in their team.

I am non-contact with a toxic parent because I know it brings out worse behaviour in myself, and I want to stop that cycle of passive-aggressiveness and judgement towards people I do care about.

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