[lolinder]

Did you look at the guidelines? Their definition of offensive seems to be "someone, somewhere might completely misinterpret what you said in such a way as to take offense." In the real world, no one takes offense at the phrase "first-class functions", but in Google's world someone apparently does.

[amluto]

I couldn’t find a definition of offensive from Google. Many of their specific policies seem quite reasonable to me. Some are in a category that could be quite demeaning to a respectably large group of people and do so for no purpose. (See “turn a blind eye”, for example.). Some have nothing to do with offensiveness but are about clarity (e.g. “holidays” — for a lot of the world, the big long holiday season simply isn’t what Americans think of it as, and, as a programmer writing in the most widely-understood language in the world, one should realize that many of one’s readers aren’t American). Some are bizarre (e.g. Google’s alternative suggestion for “hamburger menu” literally cannot be written in an HN comment and is about as easy to read out loud as the artist formerly known as Prince’s unpronounceable name; I think Google is trying to make technical writing accessible to users of assistive technologies here, but I don’t think the resulting guideline is actually practical to follow in many contexts or achieves its goal. I don’t use assistive technologies, but, if I were unable to perceive the “hamburger” icon, I have trouble imagining that a screen reader or similar system would interpret Google’s icon-based name for it in a way that made any sense at all.

And yes, some can be baffling. I’m having trouble figuring out what first-class citizen is a reference to, if anything. Wikipedia’s article on first class citizens attributes the name to a paper by Christopher Strachey, which contains a single instance of the word “citizen” or a variant thereof:

> Thus in a sense procedures in ALGOL are second class citizens

Which is clear in context and vague out of context. I assume, with no real evidence, that this is a mildly confused reference to Ancient Greece, but I could be entirely off base. In any event, the term “first class”, to me, evokes “first class mail”, which is fascinating given the complete lack of, say, second-class mail. In the UK, “first-class” has additional meanings. I’m not sure why Google thinks that “first-class” is “socially charged”. Maybe someone from Google knows?

(I understand why “blacklist” would be seen as “socially charged”, although I wouldn’t use that term. I don’t think it was originally intended as a racist term, but there was a great essay, I think by Langston Hughes, on how this type of use of “black” can be problematic. Sadly, I can’t find that essay. I could be mis-remembering who wrote it.)