Word-thinking.........................

     Word-thinking is a term I invented to describe a situation in which people are trying to win an argument by adjusting the definition of words.  In these situations there is no appeal to reason.  But that's okay, because facts and logic are not persuasive anyway.  Word-thinking happens when people are bad at logic but don't realize it.  And that's most of us, most of the time.  So you see this form of nonthinking more than any other. ... 
     We saw a lot of word-thinking in the presidential race of 2016.  At the beginning of the election cycle we saw an ongoing debate about whether Donald Trump was "conservative" enough to be the Republican nominee.  The people who said he was not a true conservative were trying to use work-thinking to eliminate Trump from consideration as the Republican candidate.  Their problem was that people did not agree on what it meant to be conservative, nor did the public think it was especially important for Trump's talents and policies to map some undefined political label.  This was the blind spot in the Republican Party that allowed Trump to become their leader without being especially conservative.  The entrenched interests in the GOP were doing word-thinking - literally the worst form of persuasion - to protect themselves from a Master Persuader with an enormous stockpile of persuasion weaponry.  It was never a fair fight.  As a trained persuader, I could see this developing from the start.  As long as the Republican establishment clung to word-thinking for their defense, they had no defense at all.

-Scott Adams,  as excerpted from Win Bigly:  Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter