Why do people use the word 'dislike' so much?
It's weird, how much that particular word is used. It's like people don't hate anything anymore, they just "dislike" every d4mn thing.
Think about it. You take a "like". Ok, you like something. But if you put a "dis" into it, it neutralizes the 'like', making it a "nothing". It doesn't turn it into negative, because 'like' is already a positive term, not neutral.
Why are people so afraid of their own emotions and attitudes, that they feel the need to 'soften' them up? Why can't people have the courage to say exactly what they mean and feel, instead of using these politically correct 'feelgood'-terms?
No one ever 'dislikes' anything. You can either love (though this word really means something else, but people use this word in all kinds of wrong contexts anyway, and it'd be too lengthy to go into it here), like, be indifferent or hate.
Now you can hate something a little bit or a lot. But there is NO emotion called "dislike". Don't take something positive, and try to cleverly weasel it into negative! Use an already existing negative to accurately describe your feeling or attitude.
You can like something or someone, you can also "not like" someone. Fine, you don't like someone - that doesn't necessarily mean that you hate them, but 'indifference' fits that category. But if you feel the "opposite of liking", that is hate.
Hate is a perfectly normal, acceptable and human feeling, and yet everyone tries to avoid using the word 'hate' to describe their hate. It's still hate, even if you use a non-word like "dislike" to describe it. You don't "dislike" your boss or a bad movie - you HATE it. Get used to it.
There are also other words people could use, but they never do - they immediately grab the 'lifesaving' (in a politically correct way), "socially acceptable", supposedly 'elegant' (and over-used) word: "dislike".
It's disgusting. It's appalling. I hate it when people do that.
You can say you are repulsed by something. You can say you reject something or abhore it. And yes, it is perfectly acceptable and normal to say and feel that you hate something. For example, who can really blame if someone hates violence? Saying you 'dislike violence' would sound pretty odd, wouldn't it?
That's how it sounds to me (and everyone like me), EVERY TIME people use that word. It's really a weird and disgusting feeling to see and hear people use such a non-word so much.
Your emotions, your body, your whole being does not know an emotion that could be described as 'dislike'. How can you even hate something just a little bit? If something tastes bad, you don't "dislike" it, you hate it.
"Being indifferent" I can understand, but our negative emotions are pretty much on-off-type things. If we feel something bad about something, it's already hate. Now of course we can hate something more than something else, there are different amounts of hate. But I don't think it can ever be so small that "dislike" would accurately describe it, and I for one have always felt that it's not honest expression of your true feelings / attitude / estimation of your experience of something.
Let's learn to be direct and honest, shall we?
Let's stop this politically correct 'diluting' of everything meaningful and genuine.
Let's forget the pretense of "dislike" and start talking about "hate", like real humans!
That's what we are supposed to be - real human beings, not some programmed automatons. Aren't we?