#Linguistic_Hijacking

Here is a term you didn't know you needed, although you've seen many, many examples of it: *Linguistic Hijacking*

Linguistic hijacking is, formally, "the phenomenon wherein politically significant terminology is co-opted by dominant groups in ways that further their dominance over marginalized groups."

Think, for example, on how the right has tried to turn the meanings of the words and phrases "woke", "Critical Race Theory", "racism", "conversion therapy", "feminism", "homophobia", and "discrimination" inside-out and you have a decent grasp of what that entails.

It is an attempt to strip marginalized people of the very words created to *describe* that marginalization by deliberately corrupting their meaning to favor dominant groups instead.

Here is a paper written by Derek Anderson at Boston University on the subject:

Linguistic Hijacking, September 2020
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344052755_Linguistic_Hijacking