I checked this thread a long time ago... and it seems the same conversation is still going...
Anyway, as a professional linguist/translator, I'll chime in, since this topic is close to home. I am completely with you, Stadler, when you insist that words do matter. If it really made zero difference whether you say "fired" or "replaced", there would be no reason for people like me to do the job we do. No one would demand our services. But as indicated by nice paychecks we collect for, say, translating and localizing a marketing copy, people are willing to pay quite well for selecting right words, regardless of whether the essence of the matter is obvious. And even if they are not (book translation typically does not pay well), they will bitch about you doing a bad job or praise you for doing a good one.
Although I agree with most of what you are saying, I think you are being a bit quixotic. I mean, AFAIK, you are lawyer, and as such, you are professionally trained to suspend your judgement a stick to facts. But normal people are not. It's unnatural for us to just take note of facts, without trying to theorize and jump to conclusions. Doing something like this requires concentrated effort and there are very few circumstances where people would do it routinely. I believe that being a lawyer is one of those rare circumstances. But for the rest of us, this just won't happen. I mean, as a translator of Taleb's Incerto series and sort of epistemology enthusiast, I know all about this stuff - in theory. But in my job, I have to assume all the time, otherwise, I would have hard time getting anything done. And this is the case of majority of people. What is more, most of our assumptions turn out to be correct so we tend to trust them (even when we shouldn't).
What I am trying to say that you are underestimating how much difference professional training or specific lifelong outlook makes in our ability to accept of follow a certain way of reasoning. Just like trained mathematicians or software engineers can'gt expect other people to follow their way of reasoning, you can't either. It just won't happen. But I applaud your effort to elucidate anyway