There are a few slightly precious linguistic taboos I have noticed people in older generations than mine are likely to maintain. Obviously, young people use the classic four-letter swear words more casually than the old, if not the identity slurs. And reserving the word “hate” for only very extreme cases because “hate is a strong word” is one of these almost grandmotherly things I have encountered over many years, a nice nod to the aspiration to not hate anyone at all. Then there is, almost certainly as a legacy of the Cold War that caused citizens of the English-speaking world to think about life in countries with other systems of government in a much more immediate way, a tendency to make a sharp distinction between “authoritarian” and “totalitarian.” A lawyer friend recently told me he called a New Deal-era Supreme Court ruling totalitarian and was rebuked by the appalled professor for the hyperbole.

Relatedly, there is the constant bickering over the term “fascism,” something that has been roiling since President Donald Trump’s election. It has produced many book sales of titles such as Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, Madeline Albright’s Fascism: A Warning, and Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, each of them intentionally or unintentionally styled after 1944’s classic pamphlet Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It by Leon Trotsky. The entire fascism discourse has also had no use and produced no understanding. This is because George Orwell was right 78 years ago to observe that “as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless.” Italy’s Partito Nazionale Fascista was, in fact, deeply incoherent and hypocritical in the set of alliances and policies and rhetorical stances it pursued, so the system of government named after it is, well, hard to define systematically. Go figure.