The R community started out calling these "joy plots" (after the Joy Division album) but then people found out about the association of "joy division" with the Holocaust (https://serialmentor.com/blog/2017/9/15/goodbye-joyplots) and so now they're called ridgeline plots.
Ugh. That really is something you can't forget after learning about it.
I never knew the name of the band was that dark. For a dark band, there's a certain logic, but yeah... will definitely be using 'ridgeline' from now on.
No it's not. "Joy" isn't a bad word. Joysticks seem to be fine.
It's specifically that the band "Joy Division" was named intentionally after a regrettable piece of history, and "joy plots" are named because of a Joy Division album cover.
Words aren't bad -- it's the meaning and derivation behind them. Etymology matters.
Do you think the Mac OS System 7.1 user interface designers at Apple should have called that grinning penis-like thing with a rash on the tip the "Control Strip"? It's just such a bad name, on so many levels.
>The Control Strip is a user interface component introduced in the "classic" System 7 Macintosh operating system. It currently exists as part of the Touch Bar interface in macOS.
>In the West, the control strip became known as the "death strip" (Todesstreifen) because of the shoot-to-kill orders given to the border guards. The East Germans preferred to call it by the more euphemistic name of the "action strip" (Handlungsstreifen). It was also nicknamed the Pieck-Allee ("Pieck Avenue") after East Germany's president Wilhelm Pieck (1949–60).
Show your evidence that "Joy Plots" were named after the Freudenabteilung. Yet you support the R community changing the name.
Clearly you're not going to find any evidence that the R community named the plots after the Freudenabteilung.
Instead of it clearly just being an innocent literal reference to the name of the band who produced a famous album cover that inspired the plots.
If your point is that etymology and history matter, then why are you saying that it matters for the R community, but not Apple?
By your inconsistent logic, it's not OK to criticize Apple for naming the Control Strip even through they may not have realized the historical meaning of Kontrollstreifen at the time, but it's OK to criticize the R community for naming Joy Plots after the name of a band instead of Freudenabteilung. Why the Widerspruch und Doppelmoral?
Your own words contradict your point: 'This isn't about "cancelling". It's about something being in bad taste in the first place, even if the originator hadn't been aware of it.' Yet now you're saying that because Apple was not aware of the dark meaning of "Control Strip", it's wrong to criticize that name. Pick a lane, and stick with it.
My point is that IBM declined to name the input device that Ted Selker invented the "Joy Button", even though that's what he originally wanted to call it (if not the "Keyboard Clitoris" or "Control Knob"), so they named it the "Trackpoint" instead. And that was most likely to avoid any sexual connotations, not about Nazi allusions.
Yet IBM has an unabashed well documented history of marketing and selling computing machinery to Nazi Germany that facilitated the Holocaust, which substantially enabled them to identify, round up, and murder many Jews and other persecuted minorities (not to mention their contracts with the US Government to help round up Japanese people into internment camps). So by IBM management's logic, Nazi are fine upstanding customers, but sexual references in product names are a no-no.
That's really, really stupid. I wish the endless quest for moral purification of language would just die already but it's only getting worse. Prudes used to get upset over words for their meanings, then because the wrongs kinds of people used them. Now the etymology can be mined for cancellation reasons even if present usage is conceptually removed twice over. I wonder how the author copes with the ones that derive from slavery and brutal execution methods.
It's exhausting catering to these people who fixate on dredging up and removing any hint of bitterness from words. We need to start treating picky speakers like picky eaters instead of continually acquiescing to the tyranny of the minority. No more fucking chicken nuggets, we are adults here.