At a different place in a different time, I once encountered a U.S. infantry battalion commander who had banned the Arabic word for "friend"--"sadiqi"--because his troops were using it perjoritively (along the lines of "gook," I suppose, in still other places and times) to describe the local friendlies and contractors.
At the time, I thought it to be a potentially futile (and Orwellian) attempt to control thought through vocabularly. Looking back, however, I have to report his order had the desired effect: It did not allow soldiers to dehumanize the very people they were there to help.
To expand on your point, then: I guess it pays off not only to recognize What the Other Guy Means by Using a Given Word, but to continually calibrate on What Your Troops Mean by Assimilating Some of the Local Terms.
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