How comfortable are people with our changing lexicon?

We did some interesting qualitative work with our friends at Burness Communications to explore how people feel about the evolution of the words we use. Are they comfortable with these changes? How do they react to newer words or phrases - neutrally, positively or negatively and why? Of course, age, partisanship, gender, race, educational attainment, region and many other factors interact with our reactions to words and we found that to be true although in our qualitative research there was less polarization than you might expect given our political polemics. No one was looking to inflame others with their word choice and more than anything they wanted to get it right - to be aware of how one’s words impact others. But if they got it wrong, they wanted to be shown grace and not assumed to be someone with bad intentions.

Here is a summary of our findings with a link to our detailed report.