[creakingstairs]

The biggest annoyance for me is that the word/woke policing throws out the most important thing: context.

We don’t punish people for crimes until we’ve had a look at the context and establish their specific intention (Strict liability withstanding) so why are we not doing the same with words and sentences?

Master/slave debacle is a prime example. Yes it can be used offensively. But for gods sake, look at the context! Annoys me that with all the injustice still prevalent in the world, they choose to fight this instead.

/rant

[chc]

That seems like an odd example. The "specific intention" of the word "slave" in computing is unquestionably to draw an analogy to slavery, so if somebody objects to the word on the grounds that it references an actual atrocity, they're factually correct.

I think what you're trying to say is that people don't mean to be offensive when they reference slavery this way. And you're right about that. Similarly, if I ask someone how their mom is right after she died, I'm probably not trying to be hurtful. But not intending an outcome doesn't actually prevent you from getting that outcome. If somebody tells you their mom is dead, and you didn't mean to be hurtful, you won't keep asking after her, because now you're aware of the effect it has.

[cuteboy19]

Why is an analogy to slavery a bad thing? Such that even references to the concept need to banned

The Partition of India was a horrific tragedy and killed 2 million people. Does this mean we should do away with partition_sort ?

[tsol]

I mean it isn't killing people, but it is admittedly strange. How about if instead you use Dominatrix and Sub? Or Officer and Prisoner?

Would those not be inappropriate because it's just borrowing terminology?

There are only a few of these progressive changes I find really valid, but this is one I can understand. It's not that it's killing people, it's just if we can change it then why not. It is kind of weird to use, given the history of slavery in the majority of the world. Can't we just not have references to slavery in the BIOS of my computer?

[eclat]

It’s such a non issue but these are the same people that wanted to change the name of Rubocop because it makes reference to policing. Or motherboard, whiteboard or blackboard because they’re patriarchical white supremacist heteronormative neo colonial etc etc pomo fashionable nonsense. There’s really not an iota wrong with making reference to these terms. It’s really an insult to everyone’s intelligence.

[notahacker]

Partition_sort isn't an analogy to the Partition of India (which isn't the traditionally understood meaning of the word 'partition').

In terms of analogies, we're much closer to if we'd decided to call a "delete all" function the "genocide" function. If computer programmers had widely used that terminology for the last three decades it might sound a bit less weird to us and the cohort of people shouting "that's such an inappropriate analogy" might be just a small group of liberals, but I'm not sure their argument about it being a poor word choice would be entirely baseless.

[throwaway290]

On this note, fun fact: 'slave' used to be the same word as 'Slav', as in literally a person of Slavic origin. The new meaning was acquired subsequently because Slavs were often enslaved in those times. So if etymologically traced further back the word itselft is pretty benign.

However, since Slav and slave evolved into distinct words and slavery is a larger phenomenon than the Partition, I'd say your point stands.

[cuteboy19]

>Partition_sort isn't an analogy to the Partition of India

And "slave" isn't an analogy to transatlantic slavery.

And anyways, who decides which words are associated with bannable tragedies?

[notahacker]

Master/slave replication is unambiguously an analogy to the practice of slavery in general (not one accurate enough to be useful, I agree). 'Partition' is a generic term for the subdivision of something, with the subdivision of India not even being a particularly prominent example.

Who decides if particular words are potentially inappropriate? People decide, including people working for corporations that make linting tools or industry bodies like the MPAA. Ironically the latter is an actual monopoly that literally does attempt to prevent people from watching films based on its word lists rather than simply suggesting alternative words, but the longstanding practice of people being fussy about certain words is apparently only terrifying or Orwellian when the potentially offended party is minorities.

[eclat]

Abort

[alpaca128]

Exactly, that's the big problem with so many of these ideas - they ignore common sense, making them look like tone-deaf measures created in bad faith. Which they probably are.