It’s not that I don’t get why we have political arguments about language. Words have power. Of course they do. Their power is to communicate concepts and define the reality of a situation. When someone uses “gay” to mean “gross and weird,” or when someone describes a person as “acting like a bitch” to denote that this person is being weak or over-emotional, or (if the person is a lady) not weak or emotional enough, or when someone casually appropriates the term “rape” to mean anything other than forced sex, I feel queasy. The reason I feel queasy is that using those words, in that way, is an act that relies on underlying concepts that are terrible. It relies on the idea that gay people are gross and weird, that women are and ought to be weak and hurtable, and that rape is not a serious enough crime for you to shudder at the mention of it, although Lord knows when a woman actually uses the word “rape” to describe her own experience you will start finding reasons why she shouldn’t be allowed to do that because, you know, It Is A Serious Crime And Let’s Not Trivialize It and all that. The words don’t mean anything unless you’ve got that structure of thought underlying them; if this weren’t true, people could just pick up the word “gay” from a “that’s so gay” statement and replace it with any given word in the English language, to the same effect. Yet I cannot start randomly going “that’s so coriander” if I want you to know what I mean. The reason people work to limit women’s ability to use the word “rape,” the reason that people work to defend the ability of guys to use it in non-rape contexts, and the reason that these are frequently the same people, is that words have power, and give their users power. Naming something is a way of asserting that you have the ability to define it. So, yes: your language matters. It makes sense to fight about bad language, because language is one of the most fundamental ways we use our power.