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While i'm not opposed to this, i do wonder where it will stop. Are financial phrases of "in the red, in the black" also bad? Is the word police bad? The police one is especially interesting. If the word police becomes banned, wouldn't police themselves simply change their name? Start using Law Enforcement more prominently, etc - and then how long until Law Enforcement becomes a bad word like Police did? Words definitely shape culture. Using "gay" as a derogatory term like i did when i grew up is clearly wrong, it shapes culture in my view. I _could_ see the argument for whitelist/blacklist also shaping culture, though drastically less i'd imagine. However i think we need to take care not to change things that themselves are not defining culture, like Police. The Police reaction is, i think, effectively an avoidance of a trigger. Of which, the science seems unclear on if even avoiding triggers is healthy (at least, based on a recently study i saw, but did not read). With that said, if i were to use my comment as logic to decide this.. `master/slave` seems perfectly fine. Slave does not imply who is the slave. If you make associations to a specific group of slaves throughout history, and even currently, the word does not seem to be the cause. Removing it from a dictionary will not help anyone. Compare master/slave to whitemaster/blackslave. The latter would _obviously_ have a .. not so implicit implication. The former, i don't feel implies anything. On the other hand, blacklist/whitelist could - perhaps - have implied associations in a way that master/slave does not. I could easily support removing that, because the implication seems clear. We should take care to draw the lines in these complex topics where they might shape our culture. Not removing triggers. |
The words aren't the problem, their usages are. I'm not convinced that we should allow the meaning of words to slip and replace them when they become offensive.