An Elephant of One's Own

Full disclosure: I think "hate speech" laws are unnecessary, illiberal and arguably counter-productive (see below). If you support such laws, you may want to speculate that I am a covert Nazi sympathizer who probably tortures kittens in his spare time, and read what follows with this possibility firmly in mind. Why this post? Very simple. As a linguist I am forced to be aware of polysemy and of semantically diffuse terms, and as an armchair philosopher I often find myself wondering to what extent our individual and collective thought is constrained by verbal imprecision, which may be built into the language we use. The lexis of emotion, for example, is puzzlingly inadequate: many everyday mental states are impossible to reference in English without recourse to circuitous figurative language and symbolism, or to Eliot's Objective Correlative. Well, it strikes me that "hate" is an obvious example of a word whose meaning is seldom, if ever, precisely and adequatel...