When Zilu asks what a ruler should do first, the Master answers: 'It would certainly be to rectify names. If names are not rectified, speech does not follow; if speech does not follow, affairs are not accomplished; if affairs are not accomplished, rites and music do not flourish; if rites and music do not flourish, punishments do not hit the mark.' The passage is in every received edition of the Lunyu, compiled by disciples in the decades after Confucius's death in 479 BCE.
The doctrine is often dismissed as fussy semantics, Confucius fussing over titles while states burn. The passage's own logic is the opposite: titles are load-bearing, because every social mechanism downstream of language inherits the corruption.
Zhengming is a theory of performative language: call a minister a minister and he must become one, or the word dies. Confucius's 12.11, 'let the ruler be a ruler, the subject a subject, the father a father, the son a son', is the same engine: names are contracts, and rectification is contract enforcement on reality.
If politics begins with corrupted words, which of your keywords no longer means what you think it means?