Many words are ambiguous. They mean one thing to you and perhaps something else to me. Intentionally capitalizing on the inherent ambiguity of some words is known as equivocation, which is a fallacy in formal logic. That is, an argument which contains equivocation is judged to be invalid.

In a previous thread, we saw an exchange on the meanings of left, right, socialism and facsism and I'll use this as an example.

Neither the Nazis nor the Communists are truly socialist, imo, since these two political movements centralize power. This in itself is diametrically opposed to the fundamental premise of socialism, which is power to the people, i.e. decentralization.

It is a stronger argument, I think, to claim that both the Nazis and the KPSS (Commie party USSR) were facism parading as socialism, albiet much more convincingly in the case of the latter, than the former.

Equivocation.

Socialism swept Europe in the closing decades of the 19th century. The Communist Party corrupted the original socialist intent by instituting a policy in the USSR of what I would call national feudalism, where state is lord, KPSS members are the nobility, and the citizens of the regime are the serfs.

In Nazi Germany, Goebbels encouraged the comunnal bratfests in lederhosen as a convenient figleaf against the naked territorial ambitions and racial hatred of the 3rd Reich. This is about as much socialism as you're going to find in Nazi Germany, but Nazi party founders were clever in choosing their party name by making it perhaps a little more appealing to the numerous communists and socialists politically active in Germany at the time.

Equivocation.

Here's the Splinx challenge: present a defintion of liberal (or left, right, conservative - your choice) which is universally acceptable, and you win the Grand Prize.

Even words such as up, down, left, right, clockwise and counterclockwise are relative terms - their meanings can change depending on context.

Ambiguously yours,
sp