Some are so offensive they are considered out of bounds at polite gatherings, while others carry enough force to incite violence.

Words have started wars and brought peace.

They can lift us to new heights and send us plummeting to the depths of despair. Some words are considered to be so offensive, uttering them is a criminal offences, while others are classified as hate speech.

We know all of this, yet perhaps it’s because we spend a good portion of each day casually chattering, we seem to forget the power words can carry.

Far too often we use casual phrases to underplay the damage done by crimes.

How often do you still hear people refer to child abuse material as “kiddie porn”, or a person who has committed sexual assault offences against a child as a “kiddie fiddler”.

There is an off-handedness to these phrases that minimises the true damage caused by these crimes to a heartbreaking level.

Why do we call stealing from businesses shoplifting? The old five-finger discount?

It’s time to call it for what it is: Theft.

So-called “revenge porn” has been in the headlines this week, with the announcement of a new online portal for reporting the crime.

For crime it is. And revenge porn? No. How about image-related abuse?

Given that we often associate pornography as a business enterprise, it just feels wrong to refer to image-related abuse as “revenge porn”, as if there is an implied permission to share it.

It seems to feed into the larger narrative that if a person – man or woman – doesn’t want to have intimate photographs of themselves put into the public domain, they shouldn’t allow them to be taken.

If we're going to change society’s view, we need to start rethinking how we talkabout some of these issues.

No one wants to be as pedantic as former Australian of the Year David Morrison with his silly demand that we stop using the word “guys” because it’s sexist, but we do need to acknowledge that words do have power, and there can be an unspoken implication in the phrases we use.

If I was to tell you someone was a “goose”, you’d know exactly how insulting I was trying to be, even though the word itself is utterly innocuous.

Likewise, calling someone a “grub” or a “germ” is a great way of voicing contempt without resorting to the kind of language that would make Jane Austen’s heroines faint dead away.

In Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare penned the immortal lines “that which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet”, arguing that the Romeo’s family name didn’t change who he was as a person.

Now far be it for me to argue with The Bard, but he almost more than any other individual human in history has demonstrated the power of words.

His words were so moving, so poignant, so funny, so tragic and so plainly powerful that we’re still quoting them 400 years after he penned them.

Language is a movable feast. It changes, grows and adjusts as society and its attitudes evolve.

Simply acknowledging that a certain phrases no longer accurately reflect the way society feels about particular issues or particular crimes isn’t that much of a stretch, surely?

Jody Lindbeck

jody.lindbeck@fairfaxmedia.com.au