It seems pointless, difficult and dangerous all at the same time to try to police our speech and writing.
Some things have benign usage that is not harming anyone or any group of people and convey the intended meaning better than alternative words.
Some things have benign usage that is not harming anyone or any group of people and convey the intended meaning better than alternative words.
Most misunderstandings arise from people having different understanding of same words - so approaching agreement on the meaning of words is important to reduce misunderstandings. The problem is the language is self-manifesting - the word gains the meaning from the way people use it, even when the meaning differs from the original (perhaps academic or technical) meaning.
So one side has to stand back - either academia (in this case, psychiatry), or the general population. Since academia largely relies on solid, defined meanings of words, while the general population relies on "how other people are currently using it", it's supposed to be easier to change the usage by the general population. Although it's pretty hard to do both ways.
Otherwise, we end up with words having two distinct meanings, one professional, and other layman.
It also was a good article about the problems behind the mental model.
But I also do not write academic / published papers.
> (22) p = 0.000. Even though this statistical expression, used in over 97,000 manuscripts according to Google Scholar, makes regular cameo appearances in our computer printouts, we should assiduously avoid inserting it in our Results sections. This expression implies erroneously that there is a zero probability that the investigators have committed a Type I error
Oh no. Big bad PC culture is stopping us from stating fallacious statistical conclusions.
Please don't dilute the quality of discussions on this site by posting reactionary nonsense before even reading something to which you're responding.