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Comment by dogleash | Hacker News Reader

Talking about the indirect meanings of 'corpspeak' is only interesting to me in the way we approach the topic.

Corpspeak isn't novel in being duplicitous language. Compared to deliberately vague, concealing, and/or loaded language from life outside work, the corporate lingo is easy mode.

But corpspeak has the property that in can be publicly discussed. "lol look at this dumb bullshit we all do for exactly these reasons" can be stated openly and plainly in a innocuous blog post, and posted to hacker news for people to hem and haw at.

Rarely does anyone even bother scratching at the fiction of our real life linguistic tricks. Because a very bland explainer of surface level phenomenon leads to outright denial, or develops into flamewars.

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> Rarely does anyone even bother scratching at the fiction of our real life linguistic tricks

My mind is sort of constantly doing this in the background, because even in mid life it never stops being jarring to me and knocking me out of the flow of language-interpreting.

My favorite example has always been "senseless act of violence that took the lives of 20 innocent people."

1. Come on. The guy had a reason that would be comprehensible to most people, even if nobody considers it a justification.

2. What does it mean to call a group of people innocent? What were they innocent of? Telling lies? Emotionally abusing others on occasion? That's doubtful. Innocent of anything that would merit being executed by a concerned citizen? Since when do we endorse vigilantism at all? Was there some doubt as to whether all 20 people in the west wing of the elementary school were all chomos maybe? WHY DO THE VICTIMS ALWAYS HAVE TO BE EXONERATED OF NOTHING IN PARTICULAR

>Innocent of anything that would merit being executed by a concerned citizen? Since when do we endorse vigilantism at all?

There's absolutely such a thing as self-defense. If a woman kills her potential rapist, she's killed a not-innocent person. We don't use the word "vigilantism" or "execution" for it, but it's a case of a person being killed by a concerned citizen where that person isn't innocent.

And even ignoring self-defense, "not innocent" doesn't mean "okay to kill them", it's more like "did something bad which increases the chance of getting killed". If a bank robber argues with another bank robber over the stolen money and gets shot, we don't call that the killing of an innocent person, even though it's not legal to shoot your partner in order to take his stolen money.

I'm talking about mass killings. It wouldn't sound jarring to me in the contexts you're talking about.

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