It is frustrating how powerful a good name is, or how destructive a poor name is. A name is that imprecise or distracting can derail what it represents. It is difficult to give a topic the breath it deserves when you are choking on the nomenclature. Evil can be hidden behind a pleasant name, or obscured from criticism by an awkward one. If you are fighting for a cause who's name requires a subtitle to convey its sentiment, you are carrying weight that your opponents likely aren't.1
It's tempting to fight the minutiae of name. A poor name guarantees a hurdle every time it is spoken about. Some topics are vague by their very nature, inviting or even incentivising poor names. Every sentence fighting over a name is a wasted opportunity to fight substance.
I wonder how many minds would be changed if you took existing ideas and gave them more effective names. Antitrust legislation is one of the most important things a government can do, but its name doesn't capture that at all. If you take defund the police on name alone, it sounds like a terrible idea. I suspect that slogan did more damage to the cause of police reform than good. Net neutrality is accurate at least but inspires so little passion.
I suppose this is just marketing. It's awful how important marketing is when it comes to change. Pro-choice and pro-life activists seemed to learn that lesson decades ago.
I used to think that programming had a unique trait that it is physically impossible to progress without constantly your variables, functions, programs, devices. Without a name you are barred from interacting with your own creations. Anything above assembly that is. A carpenter can build a table without naming any piece of it, as can an author write a book that is untitled and I could read it. But a program without a name cannot be interacted with. A program without a name can exist anonymously on a hard disk, but without a magnetic needle you'd have trouble executing it. Much like a spade requires a handle, a program requires a name. Devs do have a love of silly names in a way I've not seen in other fields. But these are names without consequence. Some names matter.
Confusion about a name can prevent understanding something through osmosis. Outside of my own family, whenever I encounter someone who knows about Burma, the only thing they know is that they don't know what to call it. Not knowing where in your brain to put something is so unnerving, instead of a string of letters and sounds you now need to maintain an abstract model in your mind. Any other news they've heard, maybe the recent military takeover, can't find a place to be stored unless they have that baseline understanding already set up. That takes a lot of RAM in a person's mind, RAM you need available if you are going to change their mind.
Language is too good an abstraction of the world. It feels accurate so much of the time that it's easy to forget it's an abstraction. In many regards, language is synonymous with reality, as far as the sensation in my brain is concerned.
Speakers are protective of their language. It is a living collective history. Someone invented every word in this sentence, I will never know their name but their influence remains. Suppressing an entire language can be an element of cultural genocide. It influences the way people see their own worlds, but it is an abstraction make no mistake. Changing society, however noble, often means changing the language of the society. It is not a surprise that social change is often waylaid by distractions found in the constraints of language and names.
We lean on language's abstractions of the world so heavily that it can feel offensive to have it challenged. How much oxygen has been wasted arguing about pronouns? Pronouns are a linguistic construct, in English a construct that is going to find its way into nearly every sentence. Would the fight for trans rights be simpler if the English language had been built gender agnostic?2 It's going to take a lot of work to undo the way the concept of gender has intertwined itself into society, but at least activists could argue for changes in society without needing to waste time fighting the language they are expressing their demands in.
Telling someone their language (their abstraction of the world) is incorrect -- to the point of being harmful -- can be done, but it's hard to do in bulk.
I have no solutions to any of these problems. We can only play the cards we are given. I just spend an inordinate amount of time wondering how things could be different. If only I had a name for that...