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Is there a specific name, a figure of speech, for a "deliberate, even subtle change of the meaning of a word"? Example: "- You're doing politics at school as a teacher! - Everything can be considered politics." Meaning of politics in the accusation: political propaganda which is ethically wrong; meaning of politics in the defense: its ontological nature that can apply to any matter in a society. In the answer, in the defense, somebody discards the meaning, the acceptation of the word "politics" as intended by the accuser, possibily in order to play tricks, win the controversy by confusing a naive audience. I would like to know if there is a specific name for that "change", that "semantic discard", the switching from a word acceptation to another, from a gnoseological level to another.

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  • Please edit your question for clarity. As it stands, your question is not very coherent, and it’s very hard to tell what you’re asking. The example doesn’t really make sense, and since the entire question is just one big paragraph of text with no divisions, it’s very hard to even figure out where the example ends. Aug 28, 2021 at 12:45
  • I put the example in quotation marks. The question looks clear to me, I realize the expression i'm looking for is quite specific. If there is one at all.
    – Caibele
    Aug 28, 2021 at 13:49

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I think the term framing is perfectly cromulent to the situation described in the question.

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  • Thank you so much! That is really cromulent! I'm still looking for a figure of speech but that word is already what I was looking for, and it opens so many new paths of research...
    – Caibele
    Aug 28, 2021 at 14:55

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