Hello and we're going to talk about basic political terminology.

Now we use a lot of terms every now and then and everyone does. We enter any kind of platform and people and switch on the

television to encounter people using isms and using several words and very frequently I get the impression that a lot of people don't know what they mean by the words they use.

Yeah, well it's interesting to me how language is used just because it's a key part of human psychology and I've actually done a fair amount looking at language and so I kind of have an understanding of how you need to approach language to use it as

accurately as possible I think and the general idea of the purpose of language more

generally in terminology by extension is that you are to be

accurate particularly when it comes to terminology because they normally

correspond to a distinct concept of some kind that needs to be delineated from others.

And in the academic world, these sorts of terms and sort of aspects of terminology are always very, very neatly defined.

Normally there's a definition that most academics go by and that's by necessity of their

work more than anything.

It's not that they're particularly

uncontentious and they can agree on stuff. It's more that if they are to do the work they need to

kind of agree on the language in which it's communicated.

And that's true of society as well. It's not just, you know, academics work.

If we are to be a society, we need to agree on what our language means, otherwise we cannot communicate.

And I mean, you need to go to something like the biblical story of the Tower of

Bible that God punishes people because, you know, they're hubris and the punishment is that they have lots of different languages so they can't communicate.

And so I think everyone has an understanding that you need a commonality in terminology and I like that in

academia they're quite nailed down everyone knows what you mean if you use a word wrong it will be called out and you'll be

called an idiot those sorts of things right yeah now you mentioned the word academia and I say

this because I really like focusing on definitions and just understanding what they mean and what they can mean because frequently they have a range of meaning.

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