Discussing individual chemicals by name is inefficient, confusing and almost certainly requires scientific citations to be remotely worthy of discussion.
Going by groups of chemicals is a bit better, but then citations are largely not applicable.
There are no synonyms or near synonyms. The dictionary definition of ”chemical” (noun), however, is explicitly clear:
1 : a substance obtained by a chemical process or producing a chemical effect
2 : a drug
I posit that the person saying ”chemical” is not being lazy, they are being scientifically accurate while enabling rational discussion.
It’s anyone saying ”but EVERYTHING is chemicals” that needs to check the dictionary.
Obviously it's broad and there will be many exceptions. The exceptions are often the interesting part of the discussion.
Words have different meanings in different contexts. Pretending that "chemicals" can only ever be used to refer to all material substances equally is just intentionally trying to sabotage productive discussion.
addlepate: Your account has been banned, and almost no one can see your posts.
To reply to you: I challenge you to define "chemical" in the way you are attempting to redefine it. People want to use it to describe unsafe or non-natural compounds, but a little bit of thinking will quickly show that that definition is impossible.
Use chemical as an adjective instead of a noun and you will do much better.
Used as a noun chemical has no meaning: Everything is a chemical, so saying the word says nothing at all.
It is, and you’re totally correct to point that out. Also “you know what he meant” is not a good reason to downvote you, because no, nobody knows what is meant by “chemical” if it isn’t literally “chemical”.
One could guess that they meant “synthetic chemical”, as if that was somehow meaningfully different than a “natural chemical”, but it’s not and it’s just as wrong.
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