BS Arguing 101

My first inspiration for writing this article was the other day when a friend of mine dragged me into an argument. I was explaining to him my theory that negativity leads to unhappiness. Of course, then, I went into more detail with it, but this is enough information for now. His means of arguing was to say that the definition of the word negative was a strong word or that it wasn’t used right in what I mean to say. Of course negative was in general terms and he was attempting to bring the argument into his own terms to change the main argument to one he could actually win, which was over the definition of the word. In the end we were yelling at each other of course and I ended up telling him he watches too much fox news and we left it at that, but somehow the event inspired me to share with you BS Arguing 101.

Sneaky Switch

Arguing or debating, whatever you want to call the conflict, consists of two people where theoretically one makes a better argument then the other in the end. Really, the idea of BS arguing is that it doesn’t really matter what you are arguing about, as long as you can control it. Like in my friend’s reaction to my negativity argument, the switch comes in to change the argument. It changes from an argument about if negativity causes unhappiness to the actual definition of the word negativity.

Now him saying that negativity is a strong word and excessive is either going to set me off to disagree and get angry with him questioning the definition, an argument he can win, even though it doesnt completely relate to what it started from, since definitions are often pretty broad, or if I admit the word not to be used correctly I would have to rethink my entire argument over, which will throw me off the argument track I am on.

Big Words

Another trick of arguing is using big words to explain something simple, leaving them not completely understanding what you were saying and feeling stupid. With this, a proud person will ignore and not question what they don’t understand for fear of being called stupid. In the field of linguistics, now we have broken the maxim of manner and I’ll add that you are not exactly correct with your argument depending on the way you look at it, with your lexical ambiguous statement. As you can see from my last sentence big words help my argument. If I just said that depending on the way you look at it, with your statement containing words that have multiple meanings, It wouldn’t really be a good argument.

Use at your Own Risk

Use this method at your own risk. These methods are considered by many to be unfair and underhanded and people have been known to get beat up after getting someone angry from this. So, if you want to keep a friend or if you are arguing with someone with a history of violence , you may want to think twice before applying these techniques in your next verbal battle with them.