This thread reminds of the game little kids play "I'm not touching you"
I'm not touching you either.
I didn't mean to get rid of them entirely. I just don't get the point of being offended by them. They're only words and they only have as much meaning as we give them, so why let them affect us if we have control over their power?
I feel sort of stuck in both worlds. I understand how to be detached from words and free. I also understand how words and language define who we are. Looking back at my childhood, I remember being able to impersonally analyze the situation and critique words aimed at me by people who hurt me, who I should have been able to trust; yet I was also deeply wounded by them, no matter how much my "brain" told me it didn't matter. I see both. We're not machines.
Language controls thought. I just read an article this morning about Orwell: "He believed that bad language and bad politics were one and the same," the author said. Interesting -- maybe food for another thread?
Much of the detachment INTPs practice (especially when younger) occurs because they naturally avoid intimate relationships with others. So of course we're not impacted by words -- we're not impacted by anything because we've put a buffer around ourselves.
But I guarantee that if you let yourself get close to someone, really close, and thus vulnerable to them and even dependent on them in some ways (*gasp!*), words start mattering.
This is what the rest of the world does understand. Not just in our personal relationships but in our public ones: Words and what names we assign to what things or what groups of people shape cultural thought, they shape public policy, they shape how we raise our kids.
We might focus on precision in the text: Words in relationship to themselves, detached from the human objects they point towards. Other people do have emotional overtones (and sometimes far more) attached to those pointers. That's where THEIR sense of nuance comes into play.