> political (“about how society ought to function”)
I feel like this is a technical definition of political, but that's not how the layman uses the word.
I tend to hear the word political used as a synonym for the current arguments within a society, especially those that professional politicians feel the need to weigh in on and/or there is a significant chance of legislation around.
So, for example, a passionate essay about a Georgism and a land value tax might be political under the technical definition, I don't think it would qualify as political under the layman definition. There's not a sufficient mass of people trying to institute a land value tax for a society wide argument to occur. I don't think the average person would describe aforementioned person as political, I'd say they'd be more likely to be written off as a kook.
Could also be a regional difference. I'm not intimately familiar with all the dialects of the english language.
Right, it's an equivocation that often comes up, when people try to tell you that basically almost everything is political, ergo you are already allowing politics, ergo you must allow all politics, ergo I must be allowed to spew the generic mindless stuff on your platform too.
Orwell introduced the term duckspeak in 1984, and it best describes the way how people understand "politics". “Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all.”
People usually don't have a problem discussing societal issues, most discussion topics somehow relate to how we live and work together and is political in that way, but more people have issues with the sort of partisan politics where the point is to score points against the "other team" over all else, painting the other side with vile adjectives, generalizing them, considering your own side as obviously, axiomatically good etc. You know it when you see it.
I feel like this is a technical definition of political, but that's not how the layman uses the word.
I tend to hear the word political used as a synonym for the current arguments within a society, especially those that professional politicians feel the need to weigh in on and/or there is a significant chance of legislation around.
So, for example, a passionate essay about a Georgism and a land value tax might be political under the technical definition, I don't think it would qualify as political under the layman definition. There's not a sufficient mass of people trying to institute a land value tax for a society wide argument to occur. I don't think the average person would describe aforementioned person as political, I'd say they'd be more likely to be written off as a kook.
Could also be a regional difference. I'm not intimately familiar with all the dialects of the english language.