From “woke” to “traumatic”: How useful terms become empty buzzwords

When a word comes to mean everything, it means nothing.

Credit: John William Waterhouse / Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons / Big Think

By Laura Kennedy

Narcissistic traits are pretty common — most of us enjoy a little admiration or praise, feel stung by criticism sometimes, and spend our adolescence nursing a secret belief that maybe we might be special, actually. In moderation, these personality traits bolster the self-regard we need to function in the world. They don’t necessarily make you a “narcissist” — someone with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), a rare condition marked by grandiosity, preoccupation with power and status, lack of empathy, arrogance, and a pattern of exploitation. Feeling mistreated after your annual performance review or forgetting to message your friend back are not grounds for a clinical diagnosis. They’re just ordinary human experiences.

“Narcissist” once clearly referred explicitly to this clinical categorization. Now, we borrow this value-laden word to pathologize people who disappoint or irritate us, turning it into cultural shorthand for standard-issue thoughtlessness, selfishness, and poor behavior online. By plucking technical language from one domain and applying it in another, we blur the boundary between describing reality and augmenting it. The result is that words we use in this way carry distinct associations but no longer clear meanings, and they can lose their utility in the process.

Conceptual stretching

In 1970, political theorist Giovanni Sartori described this drift of meaning as “conceptual stretching.” Sartori argued that it occurs when words or phrases move too far from the conditions that originally anchored them. They become gradually devalued, retaining their emotional and moral charge while losing clarity. In everyday use, “narcissist” moved from a clinical diagnosis to a sort of lifestyle judgment, yet it retains the moral seriousness — and social stigma — that we often associate with a mental health disorder. When we call someone a narcissist, we aren’t making a clinical diagnosis. We’re borrowing a term from one sphere and stretching it to perform a different function in another — in this case, to elevate the seriousness of our moral judgment.

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Conceptual stretching is all around us. “Health and wellness” could denote either a harmoniously functioning human body or marketing copy for a dubious collagen supplement. A luxury foot cream is branded “sustainable” because a part of the tube is made from recycled plastic, and on social media, “authenticity” has become a buzzword for people who make their living from constructing the very profitable optics of an aspirational life.

Conceptual stretching shapes politics, too. It’s why a fourth-wave feminist can call sex work “empowerment,” while a second-wave feminist calls it “exploitation,” with each sure that theirs is the truer feminism. The term “sex work” itself sits on what psychologist Steven Pinker calls the euphemism treadmill – the cycle of replacing words for stigmatized concepts (like prostitution) with new ones in an attempt to shed their social or moral baggage. As Pinker notes, this generally doesn’t work: The new word simply inherits the same associations as the old one.

While the euphemism treadmill swaps the label for a steady concept, conceptual stretching keeps the label but blurs the concept. It’s why “woke” shifted from an adjective signifying awareness and denoting a certain approach to social justice issues in the 2010s to a punchline. Within a decade, “woke” went from having a relatively clear and fixed meaning to becoming such an unstable and contested concept that it collapsed under the weight of competing interpretations. Conceptual stretching rendered the word incoherent — once it can mean anything, it effectively means nothing.

Sartori was picking up a thread that has run through the history of philosophy. Aristotle considered definition to be the foundation of understanding; Wittgenstein warned us that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language,” dependent on the context in which it is used. Philosophers have long worried about what can happen when concepts develop leaky boundaries. After all, how we use words shapes how we think — when our language loses clarity, so too do the ideas we try to convey. If we describe a tricky job interview as “traumatic,” or speech we don’t approve of as a form of “violence,” we don’t have these clear and strong terms to unequivocally name the instances and contexts they technically describe.

Descriptive vs. normative

Conceptual stretching isn’t always negative. Descriptive stretching happens when a term’s scope is broadened to account for new realities. It’s an evolution rather than a deformation. Words like “environment” or “community” can be stretched without undermining the integrity of the original concept. A community can be both a shared location and a shared identity.

Normative stretching works differently. It’s about persuading rather than describing, and putting the language we use to moral or ideological work. If I call the colleague who reheated salmon in the office microwave “a narcissist,” I’m making a moral statement about their behavior and elevating their admittedly uncollegial fish reheating beyond the level of everyday transgression.

If a dictatorship calls itself a democracy, or a metaphorical erasure is phrased in the language of a literal one, language ceases to be about conveying a reality but creating a rival one. The idea of cultural or linguistic “genocide” borrows from Raphael Lemkin’s original definition of a genocide as a form of deliberate extermination of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. To elevate the seriousness of a scenario that, while plausibly a form of “erasure,” doesn’t quite fit the totalizing concept that Lemkin coined as “genocide” in 1944, is to open the term’s technical meaning to debate. Meaning is stretched and becomes blurrier as concepts without a clear relationship are grouped as like cases. Normative stretching tends to corrode meaning, while descriptive stretching can refine our language by extending clarity.

The German-American philosopher Eric Voegelin, who fled Austria when it was annexed by the Nazis in 1938, described the process by which ideas fall victim to the language used to express them as “deformation.” He was interested in how ideologies that emerge in response to real phenomena become detached from reality; concepts lose their relationship to what they once referred to, and the distinction between a symbol and the thing it symbolizes is lost. When a symbol no longer represents reality but begins to replace it, he argued, we lose the capacity to differentiate slogans from truth. Our reality becomes distorted by language rather than described by it.

This is the danger of conceptual stretching in our cultural moment. Online, virality is more powerful than veracity. The vaguer and more emotionally resonant words are, the more attention they capture in our digital landscape. While conceptual stretching can feel like an evolution of new ideas, it often acts as a substitute. We distort old terms to fit new phenomena they don’t quite apply to, and we lose something of our connection to reality in the process. The luxury foot cream isn’t actually sustainable. Your annoying aunt probably isn’t a narcissist (though maybe check with a psychiatrist). The country without free elections isn’t really a democracy. Conceptual stretching might obliterate clarity, but it also reveals where we need to recover it.

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