Some words and phrases in horsemanship have become like dog whistles, which tell listeners something about how the speaker treats horses. "breaking in" "alpha" "submission"
Other words are loaded phrases from some people, but benign or even positive terms to other people "dressage" "stick" "catch"
Its partially cultural. Words mean different things to different people because of our difference experiences. Two people hearing the same phrase spoken by the same speaker at the same time will have different interpretations of the meaning.
That doesn't mean things and talking about horsemanship words is pointless. Words have power.
If a teacher tells a rider "Ask your pony to..." vs "Make your pony do..." the rider is likely to ride quite differently in response.
Also, I could imagine if a human feels "icky" about using a certain phrase, their horse might pick up on that icky feeling and dislike it. That human might make a concerted effort to remove that phrase from their vocabulary
Third, if a horse has an "icky" feeling about a place, person, activity etc, and the human had a word that symbolized very well an understanding of that place, person, activity etc, then the horse could feel icky about the symbol that the human made when the human thought or said the word which symbolized the thing which the horse or human might have had a negative experience or understanding of in the past etc etc etc as many layers of recursive symbols layered on symbols as you like.
That human might notice that the way they approach that horse and the words they use in their head around that horse affect how that horse responds to them, and make an effort to understand that.
I'm sure horses could have an equally interesting and nuanced disscussion about the ways different humans respond to all the varied possibilities of a horses direction, posture and use of space.
I think where we go wrong is when we expect to be able to label a word or phrase as universally good or bad.
I have a lot of little silly things I say to horses. I've recently been telling my pony "its pony torture time!" in a loving, joking, singsong voice when bathing, clipping, or rugging her.
My pony doesn't have any objections to being bathed, clipped or rugged - shes kinda green so they are all still a little bit novel, but thats novel like "huh, weird ok" not novel like "bad, unpleasant". I don't have any negative associations with the phrase either - its a cutesy little jingle I made up for fun.
I started saying this shortly after introducing her to these new behaviours - I knew they would be weird and a little scary for her, and I taught her about them slowly and progressively step by step, and said many silly things while deescalating - Zoe saying silly things while deescalating tension is another symbol Una is familar with btw.
If her and I keep having good experiences with these new care behaviours - she will gain confidence in my weirdness and know she is loved - I will increase in pride and joy for what a wonderfully clever youngster she is... and if at the same time I keep jokingly telling her I'm going to torture her - then eventually "pony torture time" will be a phrase that has between the two of us become charged with positivity.
I won't expect though to be able to point a pair of clippers at a different horse and tell that horse I'm going to torture them, and get the same positive response.
I've been exploring the idea of moving away from yes/no right/wrong black/white checklist thinking about horsemanship, and instead noticing more nuanced instances of all sorts of different things in their specific context between a particular horse/human partnership.
I only have one horse now days, and Im an amateur doing all this stuff as a hobby in my spare time. So I'm not putting in the mileage to be discovering any fundamental truths or gaining expertise about horsemanship 'in general'. What I can do is develop greater skills in horsemanship 'in the specific' - I can become the expert on just my own pony and discover how best to do things for just the two of us <3