[zaksoup]

I said this to another commenter who pointed out that "walk in my shoes" could be excluding language to folks who are paraplegic, I'm honestly happy to hear this feedback and consider using more inclusive language.

Frankly this is good feedback simply from a precise communication perspective. We often use special metaphors when we mean to describe complexity, and "trivial" would more easily communicate what I meant regardless.

This came up recently in my romantic relationship: I used "small" to describe an emotional feeling I was having and it did hurt the feelings of my partner, who is short. They didn't like that size was used to describe a negative emotion and I appreciated that they shared that with me and gave me an opportunity to think about a more precise way of communicating my feelings that didn't connect a negative connotation to something they identified with.

Why is this so hard to understand that I would seek to live this way? I think we should be excited to practice radical compassion with each other.

[eloisius]

Yep. My comment was 90% tongue-in-cheek but ‘small’ in the way you used it also accurately describes my lived experience with being small: unimportant, you probably won’t even notice, easy to ignore, etc. However, it’s not a big deal. If you want to strip all the analogies, flavor, and richness out of the English that you use until you you’re left with some hyper-literal newspeak go ahead. I, and judging by this thread many others, am not interested in devoting half of my brainpower to self-censoring in real-time as I try to mutter my way through giving a presentation or speak to a group.

Being conscious of your partners emotions and not minimizing their feelings is one thing. Being offended by phrases like “a little problem” or “a big deal” in public is ridiculous and laughable.

[zaksoup]

I think maybe we're a bit too far afield. I don't think people are talking about phrases like "a little problem" or "a big deal". Do you take issue with the point I raised about "falling on deaf ears?" Why are we talking about hypothetical complaints people might have about the word small when we have real examples about the use of "falling on deaf ears" or "master" terminology in tech.

I think people are making good faith attempts to communicate that those phrases hurt their feelings. I think it's not wrong to make a good faith attempt to avoid hurting people's feelings. I think complaining about a hypothetical slippery slope misses the point.

> I am not interested in devoting half of my brainpower to self-censoring

But we already do this. You don't just blurt out everything you think. If you walk by somebody in the supermarket who smells strongly of perfume do you just shout "you stink"? When you're speaking to a group you're probably picking appropriate language to use. You're not dropping a bunch of f-bombs at work and probably not using a ton of programmer-specific technical jargon or metaphors with your friends who aren't in tech.

When one of my closest friends from childhood came out as trans it took me a month to stop using the wrong pronouns for them. I had to think about it in the moment... until I didn't anymore because I built up a habit and got used to it. Now it takes no brainpower at all. This is normal. This is how normal habit-building works.

> Being conscious of your partners emotions...

But not my coworkers? Not my black peers? Not a potential hearing-impaired contributor to one of my oss projects on github?

[eloisius]

You think we’re too far afield now, I think we were several levels ago. Tomato, tomato.