Foreign Food; or, 'not included in the present classification'

Occasionally, perhaps less so today, one encounters people who complain that they dislike ‘foreign food’, as though this were an actual cuisine with definable positive qualities. Or people refer to ‘weeds’ as if these had positive botanical properties, like mosses or shrubs.

The template for this usage can be found in Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia*, wherein animals are classified in various mutually heterogeneous ways, one of which is ‘not included in the present classification’. It is as if ‘not included in the present classification’ names a certain contingent of the animal kingdom, analogous to ‘omnivorous bipeds’ or ‘marsupials’.

Language has this capacity to give ontological consistency to that which is merely an effect of our system of classification. Language lends to ‘weeds’ or ‘foreign food’ a bogus appearance of identity. Language congeals relations into ‘things.’ These can then be assigned predicates, like ‘foreign food is greasy’ or ‘Weeds are unattractive,’ which are, strictly speaking, meaningless and themselves ‘predicated’ upon a basic misrecognition.

Sometimes, though, this trick of language is harder to spot, since it springs not from a particular pseudo-category like ‘weeds’ but from the use of an already meaningful category. So, for example, there are certain people who defensively reach for the word 'post-modernism,' or sometimes ‘poststructuralism’ when they encounter a theoretical or philosophical language unfamiliar to them, an idiom irreducible to common sense.In these contexts, ‘post-modernism’ functions like ‘foreign food’, having no positive content and simply expressing the speaker's distance from, or negative relation to the thing in question. That which ‘is not included in the present classification’ (i.e., the recognisable canon of received usage), is lent an ontological consistency of its own, and the term ‘post-modern’ designates this.

Anyway, the reason I mention this is that:

1. There’s a precise philosophical term (perhaps a few) for the phenomenon I’m talking about, and wondered if anyone could remind me of it.
2. The gist of the above post creates a number of elementary problems, not least is that some would say that all ‘ontological consistency’ is merely an effect of our (Symbolic) system of classification. If this is so, how to address the specificity of the phenomenon I’m referring to, if you believe it has specificity.
3. There are of course, many many political examples of such usages. Various forms of racism immediately spring to mind. Initially, the purpose of the post was to try and identify and comment on some of these, but I’ve run out of steam, partly ‘cos I’m getting hungry, so I invite suggestions and examples from the armies of scribes and commentators, all dwelling 'outside the familiar canon of recieved ideas', who I assume read this blog.

*Before anyone says 'owt, it turns out I misremembered the Borges quote, but am forced to use my version as the whole post rests on it.