[limelight]

> No one uses "fuck" in corporate communication either.

Swear words are specifically used to be provocative, so naturally they're not going to disappear. Words like "motherboard" or "whitelist" were historically neutral and primarily used in professional settings, so removal from corporate speech is correspondingly a much bigger factor.

To be clear, I'm not particularly worried or concerned about this. I don't consider it any great loss if we start saying "allowlist" and have happily changed my projects to match. It's not a big deal, and the kind thing to do is to go along with those who do care a lot.

[teakettle42]

> the kind thing to do is to go along with those who do care a lot.

Enabling bullies in their social dominance games isn’t being kind.

[Banana699]

It's a perverted version of Pascal's wager, the "You lose nothing by pretend-believing" argument of theologians, but reinvented for an age where social mobs are the new wrathful God. If you stick your neck out and refuse the newspeak, you present a target for Them, you're essentially betting they're too weak to do anything to you, a bet you could either win or lose. But if you comply, then you're safe no matter what the actual influnce The Mob has. The Nash equilibrium is always choosing "COMPLY".

The classic mistake that Pascal and everyone using his argument to argue for their favorite God lies in the simplifying assumption :

- Compliance is cheap, low-risk and fixed-cost relative to taking a stand

Which gets less and less true as the Wrathful God (or His spokespeople) sees you're completely submitting and realizes they can continue making more and more increasingly humiliating demands. Soon enough, you discover you wish you had drawn the red line earlier.

[tonfreed]

Yeah, I generally either mock them or go into malicious compliance mode. Once they realise I really don't care about losing my job they stop pretending to care about this stuff

[Jordrok]

You have a very warped definition of the word "bully".

[NaturalPhallacy]

“Political correctness is America's newest form of intolerance, and it is especially pernicious because it comes disguised as tolerance. It presents itself as fairness, yet attempts to restrict and control people's language with strict codes and rigid rules. I'm not sure that's the way to fight discrimination. I'm not sure silencing people or forcing them to alter their speech is the best method for solving problems that go much deeper than speech.”

― George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

[raxxorrax]

Nobody can be an example of tolerance that has a problem with formal or informal modes of communication. It will never be true or believable.

[barry-cotter]

> The number of complainants can often be quite small. For centuries, theorists have worried about the potential of unrestrained democracy to lead to a tyranny of the majority, in which majority groups ride roughshod over the rights of minorities. What we often see today is instead a kind of tyranny of the minority: a system in which a particularly extreme and motivated fraction of the populace can wield outsized power in the face of a majority which is either too indifferent or too scared to oppose it.

https://areomagazine.com/2019/04/02/the-tyranny-of-the-minor...

[chc]

I don't think there's actually any substantial pushback on the word "motherboard" either. That's not a real thing people are mad about. It seems like Google's AI is just not very good at judging what is considered inclusive or not.

[fennecfoxy]

Whitelist/blacklist was a hilarious one since it derives from the light/dark day/night separation found in pretty much every culture on the planet.

It's like, of _course_ early peoples created concepts from "day, when it's light" and "night, when it's dark". It has nothing to do with skin colour or ethnicity at all.

[raxxorrax]

That is just enabling some pretty bad actors in my opinion who don't even care about minorities. People that do care tend to be very flexible about language use.

Not being tolerant here is a pretty clear sign of close mindedness in reality or just a hint of lacking life experience.