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by notahacker 1518 days ago
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.
3 comments
throwaway290 1518 days ago
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.

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cuteboy19 1518 days ago
>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?

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notahacker 1518 days ago
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.

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eclat 1511 days ago
Abort
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