Dan:

When did humans start separating into Uses and Thems? Near the dawn of language. It's an inherent fallacy of language, I guess, to try to shift reality by calling it inaccurately. Altering the ground truth of something by getting people to agree to call it something else is an ages-old trick.

It surely goes back before the days of the ancient Greeks.

My belief is that at the bottom it is born from an unwillingness to look squarely at what is there in front of you, and a desire to avoid the effort of seeing clearly. Semantic substitutes, using maps instead of territory, is the bane of human existence.

A