"Words to Avoid (or Use with Care) Because They Are Loaded or Confusing" is a maintained document in which stallman catalogs terms that he regards as rhetorically distorted, politically loaded, or conceptually confused in the context of free software and related debates. It is updated periodically and reflects stallman's conviction that language is a primary battleground in the political contest over software freedom.
The document covers a large number of terms. Among the most significant: "open source" (which stallman argues substitutes a development-methodology framing for the ethical framing of software-freedom-vs-open-source); "intellectual property" (addressed at greater length in did-you-say-intellectual-property); "content" (which treats creative works as undifferentiated commodities); "digital rights management" (which stallman insists should be called "digital restrictions management" to reflect whose rights are actually managed — see digital-restrictions-management); "piracy" (which treats unauthorized copying as morally equivalent to violent robbery); "theft" as applied to copyright infringement; "creator" (which imports romantic notions of authorship that support maximalist copyright claims); and "consumer" (which frames the citizen-user as a passive recipient rather than an active participant).
The libre-vs-gratis distinction is present throughout: stallman consistently insists on "free as in freedom" and prefers "free/libre" or "free (as in freedom)" when the ambiguity of English "free" might cause confusion.
The document is simultaneously a political manifesto and a style guide. For stallman, using the right words is not pedantry but a precondition for clear thinking. Accepting the adversary's terminology — calling DRM "rights management," calling unauthorized copying "piracy," calling software restriction "protection" — means accepting the adversary's framing of the problem before the debate has begun.
The document is closely related to did-you-say-intellectual-property and should be read alongside why-open-source-misses-the-point, which makes the political case for why the software-freedom-vs-open-source distinction matters.