> I don't believe English should be that flexible

And yet it, like any other language, is.

The sociolinguistic term of what you are engaged in would be prescriptivism, to prescribe that some term should only mean a certain narrow subset of the definitions ascribed to it, or that certain terms should only be used in pre-approved manners both grammatical and rhetorical.

Prescriptivism is very important for maintaining the ability for the majority of people who speak a language to communicate, and educators tend to be prescriptivist with very good justification. However, it's not an attribute that serves argumentation all that well; too much time is devoted to what a particular lexical item, a word or a phrase, might or perhaps should mean, rather than actually engaging with the underlying meaning.

Communication is, after all, the movement of a message from one interlocutor to another. Yes, unambiguity is important, but so is engaging with the actual argument. If someone is calling cultural erasure 'violent', it does more service to both sides of the debate to enquire further into that which is supposed to be violent, allowing perhaps the elaboration of the argument to justify its use of such metaphor.

The opposite of prescriptivism, descriptivism, is a much more useful tool (and attitude) when it comes to the way by which people actually use language, constantly changing. Change, however, is not the root of the difference of opinion between you and GP, as I shall explain in the next section.

> The word 'violence' should necessitate physicality.

From its roots in Latin, 'violence' never necessitated such a thing. Violentus (from vis, 'strength') can mean "full of [physical] strength" but also 'vehement'.

It is my estimation that nobody can be physically vehement. They might exhibit certain traits, perhaps brutish intimidation, to achieve an air of vehemency, but it is certainly not a physical attribute. As far back as the days when Latin was not a dead tongue but one flitting about two continents, the poetic and rhetorical device of metaphor was alive and well — even to call it alive is metaphor itself!

English, the bastard child of so many languages since, is not immune. To say that it should be would be to close the stable door long after the horse has bolted.

> People are trying to sneak the horribleness of physical harm in through the backdoor into discussions of non-physical harms in order to color perceptions of these non-physical harms.

They're using language as intended. One of the great gifts of language is metaphor, the proper command of which is not only the close, personal friend of the poet, the politician, but even the simple armchair

It's natural that people should reason about the non-physical world by reference to the physical world; it is our natural starting point for turning the abstract into something about which one may efficiently communicate its nature, its severity, etc.

Take the word from whence 'violence' takes its origin, vis. It means 'strength'. Obviously, there are people in the world whose physiques make them strong. There are those whose relative lack of muscular development makes them, relative to some abstract benchmark, weak.

You can use the same words to refer to the bitterness of a cup of coffee.

> I don't know what happened to ThJ in his Norwegian schools

I suggest that rather than attack the wording of the argument, it would be preferable to find out what was meant, how severe the cultural erasure was, what steps were in place to enact it, and how the participants of that culture view it from their own perspective.

For many a participant of a culture once or still undergoing cultural erasure, 'violence' is still too lax a term.