This is a perversion.

Here we call it sloganeering, and it’s a nice way to use language without actually having to think about it. It obviates any sort of intelligent discussion, and lets you just sling names at things you don’t like.

Or, if you’d prefer the Australian version, it’s calling you a dipshit.

For the first 2 years after my eldest daughter learned to talk in sentences, she would tell us things that “my old teacher” would tell her. We never figured out who this teacher was since she had never been to any kind of daycare. We figured it was just her way of coming to grips with the new things she was learning. Or she was remember the early childhood schooling of a previous life–but that’s a different subject.

Labels are applied so that you have a quick way of referring to an item/object/ideology/whatever.

Here in Australia its known as calling a spade a bloody shovel.

The questions are too long for me to type them all, but here’s my favourite:

“One of the very nicest things about life,” as Luciano Pavarotti once said, “is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.” Pavarotti, in all his well-fed wisdom, suggests that eating and meals are a separate kind of activity - often a break from the work and play of life. Yet food and meals sustain our lives in many ways every day. Tell us about an ordinary food or meal that may seem mundane to the rest of the world, but holds special meaning for you. Think about how the food was prepared, packaged, or served and by whom. Do you eat it in a distinctive manner? At a special time? In a certain place or with select company? Most importantly, explain how this everyday food sustains or satisfies you in a way that another food or meal could not.

Somewhere, Daniel Drezner is smiling.