I'm happy to move on from the word "slave". I'm more attached to using the term "master", a useful term associated with various and sundry forms of authority and responsibility, whether that be the master of ceremonies (e.g. MC Hammer), the quartermaster in the Army, or simply "mastery of your craft".
In this case, the relationship of "master" and "slave" is intrinsically linked. No one is telling you to stop using "master" in other contexts. It is the master-slave relationship here that is the issue. You are beating down a strawman that wants to remove the term master in all contexts.
In the context of this thread it might be a strawman, but there clearly exists an initiative to remove usage of the word master, even when not paired with ”slave”. One such example is the use of ”master” in Git contexts.
Many people from Europe were enslaved for example by the Ottoman empire. We moved on by being strong and not letting ourselves be
defined by this dark episode in our history.
Demanding that certain words are banned is not moving on, it's being perpetually stuck in a victim's mentality.
That doesn't mean what you think it means. To use an example from the link:
> sow (verb) – to plant seed
> sow (noun) – female pig
Not only are these words pronounced differently, etymologically they have different roots. [0] Do you have any source that would demonstrate that the technical term 'slave' here has nothing to do with the historical enslavement of people?
Homographs and homonyms are traditionally defined by words that share the same spelling (like the example you posted) and/or pronunciation (like the other example in the link immediately following the one you posted), when those words have or can have different meanings, regardless of etymology.
As an aside, I wonder if the semantic satiation from using homographs that have negative connotations for some could have a positive effect overall by diluting the connotations of what someone thinks of when they hear the word "slave", etc.
Of course, any time I make any kind of comment on this I get told that my skin color makes my opinion moot (even though my ancestors were, also, slaves). I switched to primary/replica last year (in projects where I could), but the never ending tide of other arbitrary words to change gets pretty tiring -- and two different bouts of harassment, death threats, and vandalism when I haven't made changes has really put a sour taste in my mouth about the whole thing.
> when those words have or can have different meanings, regardless of etymology
Indeed, but the GP comment was claiming that the word 'slave' had nothing to do that slavery. Because your comment only had a link to the Homography, it seemed to me to imply that you were saying two words were separate in meaning. That's why I asked for a source saying they weren't.
> It could even be argued that the semantic satiation from using words that have negative connotations for some could have a positive effect overall by diluting the connotations of what someone thinks of when they hear the word "slave", etc.
It could, but, are you making that argument? Should we then dilute the meaning of other words to make their negative effect less impactful? How many words? When do we choose to dilute a word, and how negative should a word be in order to motivate us to dilute its meaning?
> Of course, any time I make any kind of comment on this I get told that my skin color makes my opinion moot (even though my ancestors were, also, slaves). I switched to primary/replica last year (in projects where I could), but the never ending tide of other arbitrary words to change gets pretty tiring -- and two different bouts of harassment, death threats, and vandalism when I haven't made changes has really put a sour taste in my mouth about the whole thing.
I'm really sorry to hear that. I agree that the veracity of the backlash and counter-backlash is not helping anyone, and in on the whole hurtful and not constructive. But is that an argument for not using primary/replica? Is that an argument for never changing anything, since there will almost always be some kind of backlash to a change?
This is not about the feelings of processes. It's about the feeling of engineers who have to work in this environment. Names are arbitrary; why not pick a better name that isn't tied to scars in our society that have not healed, and wrongs in our wealth distribution that have not been corrected by reparations?
But if we excised every word linked to some horrible thing people did from names of things, we'd have no words left to use to describe things.
Look, I get it. I can't tell you how many times people are discussing a problem and describe their "final solution" and I cringe a little inside. But I don't say anything, and I don't ask them to change their language because those are the correct words to use, they just have an unfortunate association. But of course the people saying it are not thinking that at all, nor do I suspect they even know the connection most of the time.
Cleansing nomenclature is a fool's errand and won't actually address the real issues we face today.
Indeed, think of the poor right wing engineers who feel the ever tightening noose as they walk on eggshells as the tech industry gets more anti-right.
There are tons of rightwingers in tech or wanting to get in to tech who are feeling excluded and unsafe due to the modern political environment, way more than there are potential black/minority software engineers put off by use of terms like "blacklist".