Words are magical, Allie, and being a user can be read as an empowering action. Compare user for instance to (made-up word) usee, and you probably get my drift.
The word user as you are using it belongs to a particular setting and should not be recognized without the setting. It’s meaning stretches beyond the word itself.
Let me explain: It fits a producer to consider the user. This larger setting still emphasizes the user as the center of attention, it does not emphasize the producer. The producer is the servant in this larger setting. The user is important because he or she can make or break the product.
I actually used the word break here on purpose, because in Dutch and German, it is only a small step from break to bruik and brauch. The user is the gebruiker or gebraucher. The action of breaking things (in) is given to the user.
Naturally, breaking is not good for a product, but breaking in a product definitively points to using a product.
I had to double check that line of thought because one cannot simply use similar sounding words to declare a word’s origin or larger field of meaning and be done with it. While exploring the word ‘use’ (not an English word, but a Latin word), I stumbled upon the word to employ.
Employ is connected to use as a word with similar meaning: make use of. As you can see, this points already more to the world of production of employer and employee and takes away the positive emphasis for the user, or so it appears. But this French word also contains that ploy movement; one can recognize breaking in here as a bending of things that ends up making a new product used. Ploy is based on plier which means to fold.
The word use is also used as practice, common practice, something done on a regular basis. This also sits well with Dutch and German, gebruik and gebrauche. It is the custom of doing things this or that way. Naturally, the word customer appears from the word custom. Again, just customer, no customee.
It is only a short jump then to costume and to habit, things we wear and do on a regular basis. Things we use, things that have or show a function.
Finally, Latin. The word utile or ute from which user ultimately derived means to benefit from. An archaic word in English is usufruct, meaning the right to enjoy the use and advantages of another person’s property short of the destruction or waste of its substance. There is therefore pleasure in being a user.
Long story short: the word user is a rather neutral word in the meaning that it can get used for indicating anyone (in a setting of things). It is also an empowering word, because the user is the center of the word, and does not point to the thing being empowered nor the producer of the thing being empowered.
Yes, the customer is king. Can’t get any more important than that (in the specific setting). And if we have a free-market in which the users have a decent choice what product to buy, then the producers dance for the benefit of the users, and not the other way around.
