Something every educated person should internalize is that a large fraction of statements by authority figures have no information content at all, but only seem like they must be important because ambiguous phrasing creates a false impression of profundity.
This just doesn't seem true to the way people use language! Usually they don't know why exactly they think a thing, or even what exactly they think. But they have an experience (like, maybe love sucked for them) and they got an impression (like, maybe love is overrated), and
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they want to convey that impression of life to you and make you have *roughly* that sense of things as well. "Love is just a word" seems like a perfectly good way to gesture in a direction like that. It's not an argument. But it's only very rarely that arguments are possible.
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It's a terrible form of communication even if it's common, because people often *think* they share some sort of common information after exchanging such phrases even though they've conveyed almost nothing at all.
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No, you mean, "people don't use language this way because they've been conditioned by people who prefer that they not think hard about what they're hearing". People even add obfuscation routinely in order to make themselves seem more educated.
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It's perfectly possible to work to force yourself to be precise, and it really does act as a sort of vaccine against attempts by politicians and essayists to hijack your thinking. It's not perfect by any means, but it's something you can really do.
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