I'm sceptical about "the subconscious" in Freudian psychology, et al.

But I'm a believer in the influence of the subliminal upon our behavior. Roughly, these are "background" activities of the brain which do not appear in the "foreground". In particular, I worry about the subliminal effect of language, oral or written, for at least two reasons:

1. language is our most important tool -- that which makes us human;
2. our greatest language (when properly formulated) is mathematics, which created civilization.

I'll give you an example of what I mean. I worry about the careless use of the F-word. Too many people go about (especially in films and TV) castigating the F-ing-this and the F-ing-that, yet use the same word for erotic love. Subliminally, they're pejoratively labeling erotic love. They might as well take a vow to chastity! (Note: The use of the S-word may intrude on the privacy of others, but it doesn't have a similarly unfortunate effect, subliminally, for both references concern something we wish to cast off.)

Another pervasive example, involving all of us, even those who don't cuss. I have elsewhere formulated the "commandment" -- "Thou shalt not attribute!" When we say to a child, "You are bad!" or "Bad boy!" or "Bad girl!", we are attributing an inner nature of badness and effectively postulating this as the prototypical feature of a person.

My dear departed wife, Esther -- afflicted by polio at 11 1/2 months, enduring 80 years of hospitals, canes, crutches, whellchairs, being bed-ridden -- was offended by hearing people talk of "the disabled". (The term "handicapped" is even more offensive, since it means "beggar" -- some one who handily takes off a cap to hold out for alms.) Esther wanted people to speak of "a disabled person", not characterize a person wholly by an affliction or status -- "the deaf", "the retarded", "the rich", "the poor", etc. (ONLINE, in one of my three memorials to Esther, I have an account she wrote, mentioning "the TAB" -- temporarily able-bodied person -- which characterizes all of us nondisabled persons.)

I'll cite a few scimath abuses of language which confuse or mislead:

• the input of a function is usually called "variable", a term borrowed from physics, for something which does not vary in its implementation, so I've suggested "functand" since we use "operand" as input of an operator;
• we still speak of "sunrise" and "sunset", terms originating when it was believed that the sun moves around the earth, implicitly ignoring Corpernicus et al;
• the great French mathematician, Henri Poincaré (1854-1912), pointed out that "heat" is a substantive and caused scientists to search for a substance -- such as phlogiston or caloric -- to explain it, until replaced by the notion that this phenomena is due to motion of molecules, better described by a gerund such as "heating";
• in fact, scientists once classified both heat and light as chemical elements, along with carbon and calcium;
• the substantive is attributive and widespread use of it in scientific language can subliminally evoke an animism: the belief of "spirits" in everything -- wind, river, storm, etc.;
• the previous problem was inherent in the momentous debate between the great physicists, Albert Einstein (x-y), and Niels Bohr (x-y) over the nature of quantum physics, with Einstein abandoning his relativistic position for the attributive and Bohr upholding the relativity of contextualism -- a debate which most physicist now agree was won by Bohr;
• we teach a little child to count his or her fingers as "one, two, three, ...", using cardinal names for an ordinal process, which may subliminally implant "the paradox of counting";
• peculiar spelling due to historic origin of naming confuse or repel the laity, such as the spelling of "physics" without explaining that "phy" is from Greek "phi" which is a single letter (j), and the spelling of "psychology" without explaining that "psy" is from another Greek single letter (y);
• the peculiar names for our number systems:
  • natural numbers (are other numbers unnatural, perhaps "kinky"?)'
  • integers (do they have integrity?)
  • "fractions" (can't these broken numbers be splinted?) for rational numbers (are the irrationals crazy?);
  • real numbers (Did you ever see a dream walking? Did you ever hear a real number stalking?);
  • imaginary numbers (Do only "nuts" make contact with these?);
  • complex numbers (described by compound syntax).
• In biology, I've a list of 22 references for the term "evolution".

Also, we need a dictionary of univalent words: each a word with exactly one meaning. Where a needed term is polyvalent (conveying many, often conflicting, meanings), create a new word by changing the spelling of a polyvalent word, deigning it to have one specific meaning. I did this by creating the word "conek" to denote an important concept having many connections in daily language (lowconeks) and connections in advanced technology ("hiteks"). Given univalent words, our communication would very much improved and avoid subliminal associations.

As citizens ostensibly represented in a republic, we are at risk because of the buzz-word "average". People usually think this is the arithmetic mean of sample data, which often misrepresents the population from which the sample is drawn.

A better word is representor and might make us aware that the 20th century development of statistics provided us with a measure of representation -- a measure of "republicaness".

As long as participation of ethnic groups and other groups departs from the current demogrpahics our republic is in partial failure. This failure especially puts kids at risk, since they have no citizenship, and their supervision by quasi-citizens is open to incompetence or abuse.

Thus, language-abuse results in human-abuse.