If you’ve done much reading on the Internet about slavery and abolitionism, you must have noticed that a lot of writers and websites avoid the word “slave.” They prefer expressions like “enslaved person.” The idea seems to be to remind people that slavery is an externally imposed condition and, at least in principle, is always subject to change. That’s understandable, even if it seems clumsy. Are there other nouns of status that people are replacing with phrases for similar reasons? We still speak of “prisoners,” “servants,” and “refugees” without circumlocution. Maybe there’s less of a tendency to treat those conditions as permanent.

The phrasing has had an unfortunate side effect, though. The word “enslave,” according to Merriam-Webster, means “to force into or as if into slavery.” It’s now widely used to mean “to hold in slavery.” Dictionary.com gives the additional meaning of “to hold (someone) in slavery or bondage.” Bringing a person into slavery is a more active evil than holding someone in slavery, and the distinction is worth keeping. When a change in usage becomes widespread, there’s no stopping it, but sometimes the language is poorer for it. This is shaping up to be one of those cases. I expect that Merriam-Webster will soon add the new definition, and the watering down of the word will be official.

Nitpick on top of the nitpick: You can argue that when slaves had children and their masters registered the children as property, that was “enslaving” in the proper sense. It hasn’t been automatic through US history that children of slaves were slaves. If we accept that people are born with the right to be free, then treating a newborn as a new slave is an act of enslavement.

Tangentially related: I don’t say that people “own” slaves. The basis of all property is that people own themselves. People can force others to do things, but they can’t have ownership rights to them, and any law that claims otherwise is based on a falsehood.