Confucius spent years insisting that the right word for a thing matters more than almost anything else — that calling a bad official 'good' or a bad policy 'reform' quietly corrupts the judgment of everyone who hears it. His term for this was zhengming, the rectification of names. It sounds like pedantry. It isn't. When you mentally label a spontaneous restaurant meal as 'self-care' instead of 'spending,' or a risky side investment as 'diversifying,' you've done something subtle but powerful: you've made the action feel categorically different, which changes the emotional accounting attached to it. The same choice, differently named, feels like virtue or vice — and that shift isn't cosmetic. It changes what you're likely to do next. Today, pick one thing you've been calling by a softened name, and say the blunter word for it to yourself. Not as punishment — just to see what it actually feels like without the rename.

What is one recurring choice you describe to yourself with a word that makes it feel more virtuous than it probably is — and what's the plainer word for it?

Drawing from Confucianism — Confucius