It's amazing how influential our perception of certain words is in determining fact from fiction. Just off the top of my head I can think of heaps of words that immediately add a little something to what I perceive a person is saying:
clearly - I can't even back this up
It's beyond me - I am resorting to hyperbolae because I don't care enough to think
trust me - I am the last person to trust
family values - my family is bigger than my IQ/I'm a convicted pedophile/I'm cheating on my partner with a man
breeder - I'm queerer than folk and dumb to boot
The media says/does/supports - I can't think for myself
lol - I lack higher cognitive functions
f--k - I'm afraid demons will eat my soul if I say fuck
G-d - I'm afraid God will eat my soul if I say God
intellectual - I hate people smarter than me/I hate people dumber than me
etc.
You'd have your own lists. Where it becomes really interesting though, is in how these perceptions influence the way we write. For example, I hate short sentences. I rarely use them. I think they are staccato. I think they show a terrible fear of joining thoughts together. I also hate entire paragraphs that start with 'I' because they're self-indulgent and have a horrible tendency to end in self-referential statements.
As you can also see, I frequently write things that make me cringe when I read back over them, to the point where I've abandoned entire topics rather than read what I've said previously.
But - and here's the important thing - these are the prejudices that affect everything I read and everything I write. If I want to appear a certain way, I'll write that way. While my style is fairly consistent, if I'm writing for work, I drop punctuation and slash sentences back. I also throw in more jargon, because that's what my work requires. Syllables thud into sentences, displacing shorter words and weasal vocabulary burrows into what might otherwise be convincing arguments.
Online it gets particularly interesting. There's a strong anti-intellectual (see above) push online, matched only by a strong superiority complex from everybody.
All we can see is each other's words. All we can leap to is the conclusions our experience has taught us - I heard geopolitical in a sentence once, it must be wank (thanks tatamir, I'll keep that in mind). The last person I heard use the word conservative weighed 150kg, ergo all conservatives have packed on the pounds. People who talk about people rarely ever talk to people.
I didn't write this with a point in mind. I'm not an expert on semantics, I merely find it interesting. But if there's one thing I've learnt over the years, it's that the way you say something is vastly more important than what you say. And perhaps I need to pay more attention to this when I write on JU. Not that I'm going to, but it would be nice to think I am.