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Yeah 'decolonise/decolonised' has become meaningless nowadays... I saw a headline yesterday, "anti-vaxxers are colonising civil rights rhetoric", it's awful that anyone thinks that statement makes any sense (they mean "steal" or "copy" or "misuse" I guess). Worryingly, it's often used in place of words like 'revolution', 'democratise', "rewild", 'autonomous', "insurrection", "revolt". I honestly don't know what someone means when they say they want to "decolonise the university", "decolonise the media" and shit like this. Do they mean they want the content changed, they want a black CEO in charge, or they want the whole thing reorganised on some other model - and if so, what? There's very important differences... for example, does someone believe in deschooling, child-centred schooling, some kind of radical learning model, or just a change in course content... these are completely different things. Ditto autononomous media, revolutionary media, worker-controlled media... different concepts. Honestly, they don't even tell us what they're fighting for most of the time.

A few more I usually avoid (outside of inverted commas) and why:

Privilege: misreads external social inequalities as internal attributes, and mixes up socioeconomic and discursive inequalities

Safe(r) space: pretty much an idpol brand-name; and usually confuses comfort with safety. Also, control is not safety

Social justice: buzzword, no clear meaning; idea of justice has statist, sadistic, and society-as-balance connotations

Acceptable: this one projects an internal emotional state (refusal to accept) onto the object of the emotional reaction; it also implies that reality should be governed by moral reactions

Development, developed, underdeveloped, advanced (countries), less developed, developing: all imply a hierarchy of improvement with industrial society at the top. I'll use core/periphery, North/South, or inverted commas "developed" etc

Responsibility: can be innocuous if used in an existentialist sense, but is usually plugged into imposed moral hierarchies and inequality (X is responsible to Y)

Radicalisation: closely tied-in to conveyor-belt COIN theory which is discredited

Extremism: implies the existence of a moderate centre which other positions are at varying degrees of distance from; mostly used as boo-word. I'll use "mainstream" for the dominant position

Terrorism: similar to the above two; only differentiated from "war" or "war crime" by moral judgements about the legitimacy of perpetrators

Crime: this one's hard to do without, but it has three problems - it's defined in reference to statist norms, it's heavily loaded, and it's a very broad category of actions which have nothing substantive in common. I'll make descriptive exceptions when talking about (say) illicit economies, repression risks, or criminalisation discourses.

Behaviour: implies people are unitary self-controlled responsible subjects, which quite often they aren't.

I think there's tendencies for the dominant ways people live day-to-day to inflect the root-metaphors they use in everyday language. For example, a hunter-gatherer band usually uses a lot of nature and nurturing metaphors, herders will use herding metaphors (God-as-shepherd, society-as-flock...), Fordist industrial societies use a lot of industrial metaphors (social engineering, thermodynamic models of the psyche, etc). There is also a tendency that dominant groups' ways of seeing get diffused downwards in language and metaphors - so there's a lot more management metaphors (say) in everyday use than workplace metaphors. We shouldn't *always* avoid these as some are good metaphors (e.g. maybe the psyche DOES function dynamically), but we need to be aware of where they come from, and avoid those which embed false assumptions.

Some to watch out for are

* mainstream psych-speak (emotional intelligence, emotional safety, cognitive patterns, everything-as-healing...), which comes with a cybernetic psychological model attached,

* cybernetic-speak; humans as computers (hard-wired, brain circuitry, feedback loops, nudging, salience/relevance, etc), which extrapolates from (depthless) machines, algorithms, genes to (depth-possessing) humans

* pig-speak (restore order, disperse, contain, reasonable/excessive force, secure a perimeter, etc), which carry a pig way of seeing (there's a danger here, even with words like "riot" and "violence", as well as with legal-inflected words like "assault", "harass", etc)

* pig-dysphemisms (people trafficking, money laundering, illegal immigration, terrorism, violent extremism, troublemakers, hooligans, tiny minority...) - generally loaded language with a strong "boo" component; only really useful if reclaimed

* edu-fix speak (everything-as-learning, everything-as-literacy, everything-as-intelligence... e.g. critical literacy, political literacy, emotional literacy, activism-as-learning, political intelligence...) - generally embeds assumptions of malleability and of solubility by means of packaged education

* management-speak (everything-as-management, e.g. emotional management, child management, animal management; human/social capital, investments, prioritising, branding, strategy, challenges instead of barriers, etc) - often embeds power-hierarchies (manager vs managed), instrumental reason, a particular authoritative moral economy, and usually a false optimism

I also try to use more exact ideological designators than "left", "right", "liberal", "radical", "socialist", "democratic", etc. Anarcho-communist =/= Stalinist =/= social-democrat; neoliberal =/= right-libertarian =/= social liberal; neocon =/= ancap =/= Nazi. Knowing your enemies and temporary allies, and how their ideological "machines" function, is important.