Does the way a thing is described affect the thing itself?

Let us take the word discrimination as a quick and easy example of how a word may come to have, through its regular use in one particular context, a specific connotation which tends to evoke a socially conditioned response from individuals seeing the word, or hearing it used.

'Discrimination' tends to produce negative imagery in the minds of our people because they have been socially conditioned by the prevailing cultural orthodoxy to associate the word with unpleasant connotations. Yet a synonym for the word discrimination is 'discernment', which by contrast tends to evoke a favourable response.

It would appear that words may mean pretty well whatever we may wish them to mean.

I'm sure that we could all come up with other examples of words which have, over time, acquired bogy status. On hearing the word, some individuals' critical faculties are impaired and they react to the word in a socially conditioned way, without pausing to consider, or to question, to what such a word actually refers and whether it is, in fact, reasonable to apply such a word in any particular set of circumstances.

Some such words seem to serve the social function of obscuring, rather than clarifying, social relations and interaction: of closing down debate and reasoned argument, rather than eliciting and elucidating meaning.

One is given to wondering why that should be. Who benefits from such a taboo and who suffers because of such word magic?