[lin83]

It's probably a good idea to avoid insulting or alienating your audience. My manager is a woman and I run into code and setup documentation all the time that says things like "he should do X/Y/Z". At least our documentation team fixes that before public release.

Google's guidelines are here: https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation

I have to say though some of their examples are weird. I have never encountered anyone that would object to the phrase "senior citizens" or the word "hang" in documentation. The idea that the latter could cause "unintentional harm that might be caused by the violent interpretations" is frankly absurd.

[userbinator]

I have to say though some of their examples are weird.

You should be scared and deeply angered that Google is attempting to force changes to language which are mainly based on some radical political ideology.

[lin83]

I am absolutely concerned about some of their actions, like their paused "inclusive suggestions" [1]. There's a big difference between providing a guide and highlighting words in an email that are marked as 'wrong' purely for perceived cultural reasons.

Google's suggestion to change "landlord" for example, which has very specific cultural baggage and, more importantly, legal definitions, to something else is definitely wrong and worrying. I think it takes a certain arrogance that maybe only a Silicon Valley tech company can have to try to change how billions of people speak.

I'm not sure how much of an ideology it is though. Like the writers guide above, once the reasonable suggestions have been made, the authors seem to overreach to find more things to "fix". If a persons job depends on finding "problems" they will simply create new ones once the run out of legitimate ones. I think that's true whether it's planning officers for property development or politicians.

[1] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/apr/25/google-word...

[azinman2]

I guarantee you there’s no job at Google that solely consists of trying to find new language to ban. That’s absurd.

[lin83]

I don't believe I said that is the case. A situation with poor or unintended incentives is not hard to imagine.

1) A team is tasked with providing suggestions to improve emails

2) "Inclusive language" or avoiding potentially insulting language is added as a feature by higher ups

3) The more entries in the "Inclusive language" feature the better the outcome looks to management or it helps meet some arbitrary employee metric (velocity or x issues resolved or similar)

4) More and more entries get added because it is easy to do

[AussieWog93]

Have you never worked in a large company before? These people are everywhere, and breeding like rats!

[bjt2n3904]

> It's probably a good idea to avoid insulting or alienating your audience.

I already avoid insulting or alienating my audience. I don't need to write "inclusively" to do that. Good documentation is already bland and unoffensive.

> I have to say though some of their examples are weird.

And that's exactly what I object to. Something absurd like, "Use the term 'main' instead of 'master' for your repository's primary branch." Why? Because... ...slavery? This is lunacy.

Five months later, this arbitrary standard will change again. Talking about "primary branches" is now offensive, because it implies that one branch is more central than the others, and this is offensive to plural beings who identify as a Crape Myrtle tree. [1]

It's literally a bunch of people imagining ways that things can be misconstrued as offensive, and twisting language to the point of absurdity. I have better things to do with my time than to run on euphemism treadmills.

1 - https://www.pluralpride.com/playbook

[dividedbyzero]

Frequently this has to be mandated to some degree, otherwise you get people who feel using male pronouns and names exclusively is fine even if the target audience is overwhelmingly female or that "shit" is a perfectly fine synonym for "stuff" in official documents or that terms that are considered brutally racist by everyone but the very far right are fine for public release because they are technically correct in an extremely narrow way. It saves everyone a lot of time and breath if there is a mandatory set of guidelines to point to; adhere to them or this will not get released. If those guidelines are done well, it's hardly ever an issue except for those special types that are on some kind of crusade or whatever.

[blep_]

> terms that are considered brutally racist by everyone but the very far right

Are you talking about "master"? There are plenty of people outside the very far right who agree that slavery is bad but think that particular rule desperately needs some context-sensitivity.

[dividedbyzero]

No, not "master", I don't think that would fit the "anyone but the far right" and it's perceived as a mostly US-centric issue here (we have other radioactive terms made so by local history), so mandating that probably wouldn't have helped us with a local audience anyway. The actual term wasn't English and was pejoratively descriptive of a visual characteristic associated with a certain racial background. I can't think of a similar term in English (there must be a bunch, though) but it was an obvious racial slur and really not something you'd expect anyone could seriously want to use unless on the very far right fringe or something like that.

The only people I remember with whom things like that had to be brought up were either apparently trying to use the brand for political leverage (which really isn't an option, can't do that) or had difficulty "getting" subtext and nuances in general paired with strong opinions on how they thought people parse language.

That's what I mean by "done well", only mandate what really would cause damage otherwise and be conservative about that, most people will try to minimize damage anyway and will be fine, but some people won't or can't and having that written down and declared mandatory helps clear up such situations.

[8organicbits]

The Google wordlist has lots of examples that aren't about offense, like use of hyphens and brand names.

My guess is that "senior citizen" is considered American English, so it's a poor choice for global audience. They even write "avoid figures of speech" to clarify that section.

[jpindar]

Let me guess... senior citizens is probably offensive to the, uh, differently documented.