Word misuse

A pet peeve of mine is how words are used.  I dislike misuse of words.  Now, there are a lot of cases where it does not matter much, such as disc for some types of computer storage devises.  But some words misused in political, misleading and uninformed ways are frustrating to me.  I do not like how left and right became political words.  I dislike how politicians use words in ways to confuse or mislead the public.  Companies and advertisers do the latter as well.  Truth, facts, reality, science are words which I believe should be more carefully used.  Belief is confused with truth.  Hearsay is confused with facts. Ideas are misrepresented as theories.  Things are called science which have little or no use of the scientific method.  This all came to me when I was searching the web about realism.  Early on, I came across an international perspective called realism.  The proponents use the word because they believe that they are basing their views on what is really happening in the world.  But they move away from realism as they make policy suggestions based purely on their perception of current conditions.  They skip over psychological and sociological factors.  I was surprised to discover the term racial realism and that scientific racism is still in use.  These terms relate to biased attempts to show how science and reality "prove" biological inferiority of specific races.  But the beginning bias of most of the proponents of these views is that they are racists to begin with.  From there, they assemble only the data which they believe supports their views.  They ignore or discount the evidence which contradicts them.  They also exclude psychological, sociological and historical factors.  Then we also have religionists who misuse words such as facts, truth and science.

Part of being a literate people is knowing when and when not to use words.  I fear that some groups of people are becoming less literate in this context.  They know a lot of words but not how to use them wisely.