The article you link to discusses "lunatic" being offensive when used in law in its original sense to refer to real people with real mental health problems. Whether that is offensive (and I think it probably is) is a completely different question from whether its modern, colloquial use is offensive.
The word dramatically declined in popularity through the 19th century but started climbing again after ~1995[0]. The recent increase in usage is driven entirely by a much milder, colloquial meaning of "wildly foolish"[1].
I think being offended because our great-grandparents used the word literally is a bit silly.
The origin of the name comes from the fact that it started as a Lua project. In Lua (Portuguese for moon), everyone loves any "moon" related names or puns for their project. As such, "Lunatic" fits right in.
As someone who has family members with mental health issues, I don't find the term offensive at all.
I, for one, by default think more of someone who's obsessed with the moon, I guess it's because I never read that article, so I've never been told to be offended by it.
All that said, I do hope that the authors understand that they might be fighting an uphill battle with regards to adoption.
> Society is very much able to form opinions on what is widely considered offensive and what is not.
Except there isn't an agreed upon opinion, just a certain number of loud individuals trying to silence others, and everyone else who just quietly don't care.
> You've been proven wrong right now.
I was saying that it's impossible to prove that something isn't offensive. Please take your time to actually understand posts you read before posting angry comments.
> Except there isn't an agreed upon opinion, just a certain number of loud individuals trying to silence others
Again you are trying to make a strawman, claiming that it's just some minority and you are so brave for standing up to them.
It isn't. Open a dictionary and you'll find a number of words clearly defined as offensive.
Language isn't just an opinion of few people.
> I was saying that it's impossible to prove that something isn't offensive. Please take your time to actually understand posts you read before posting angry comments.
Someone on here recently asserted that ditching the colloquial use of "crazy" had significant mainstream support. I pushed back on people even noticing that it might be a problem, let alone actively choosing not to use it, being anything like a norm outside tiny niches of terminally-online Web users.
Sure enough, sensitized to it, I heard an NPR host and a Chipotle ad use it in the colloquial sense within the next week. And those are just the ones I noticed, and that were very-public rather than in private conversations.
This stuff's not mainstream and normal people don't care a bit. It's not even caught on in groups worried about impressing the word-police crowd (major advertisers and NPR both qualifying, I should think).
Let's just put it this way, I'm not advertising in anything associated with my professional credibility that I use "lunatic", for the very obvious reason that it's possibly offensive to some people and that the word offers nothing to convey meaning. I don't have to find it personally offensive to not want to associate with it.
On the other hand, there are other people who might apply a different heuristic and guess that a project named 'lunatic' is less likely to attract the sort of people who might take, for example, a code of conduct as a tool to beat other contributors about the head. (I'm not saying that's you!)
I guess there are "swings and roundabouts" and peoples' rules of thumb differ, which is perhaps diversity that's all to the good.
> definition of "lunatic" - "a person who is mentally ill (not in technical use)."
Have you, your relatives or your friends ever used the phrases "are you insane?" and "are you out of your mind"? Were they being insesitive. Should you/they be more thoughtful how it would be perceived by other people, that you/they so casually use a very modern (and not 19th century) refernces to mental illness?
What about, I don't know, Insane Clown Posse who formed in 1989 and won Outstanding Hip-Hop Artist/Group at Detroit Music Awards? They probably need to re-think their name, too?
Looney Tunes? (Looney is the same as Lunatic) Or looking at some of the adjacent terms, perhaps Animaniacs?
Is it still that offensive? The linked article discusses a peak of the term around reform of 19th century "lunatic asylums" where the phrase was in common use and had dark connotations but aren't all those people dead now? Is the term still somehow problematic and if it is, doesn't that imply that words like "insane" have the same problem?
As far as I can tell, it's not offensive, and was never offensive. What can be offensive is using it as a term to refer to the mentally ill, especially in law - and it's really more antiquated than offensive even there. We have more specific and thoughtful terminology for varieties of mental illnesses now, that have nothing to do with the moon.
So if you have a law on the books governing how to treat lunatics, or how lunatics should be treated, it's a dumb old law because there's no official test for lunatic. It would be just as stupid if you had laws about the "wacky" or the "nuts."
The overwrought nature of the concern about seeing the word as the name of a piece of software is just a symptom of the current zeitgeist.
I mean, I had to think about it. Whether it's hugely offensive or not isn't necessarily the right question here. With the whole English language to pick from there are probably better choices that are less ambiguous.
I personally worry somewhat about social-censure. Here's [1] a talk that asks (among other things) if Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses would be published or even written today and I think that concern relates a little to our conversation. While its quite easy to see the argument for self/social censure (as usually someone is personally motivated to make it), I worry that the argument against it is much harder to see and has less organic advocates.
This logic implies that one could name a project after an explicit slur and it being a project instead of a directed insult makes it no longer a slur. That doesn't track at all.
A few years back a non-native English speaker presented an Erlang library called `coon` because he like this abbreviation of the word `raccoon`. [1]
The shitstorm from Americans (US and Canada) was unbelievable. Even though:
- most people on the mailing list where this was discussed never heard it used as a slur
- people in the states where this word was purportedly still used as a slur never heard it used
- several black people (both African Americans IIRC and a guy from South Africa) said they had no problems with the name (and promptly ignored)
The name of the library was changed.
Now. The question is: who decides it is a slur especially in our global world? Somehow, increasingly, it's the white Americans who end up being offended on everyone's behalf.
See also: the performative activism around master/main branches in git.
man, don't be ridiculous. 'coon' is objectively a long standing racist slur. That some people ("a guy from South Africa", ffs) claimed not to know this or notto have heard it personally doesn't make that untrue. I invite you to go to any black neighborhood in the US and chant 'coon' for as long as you can to determine just how performative the white americans are being. I'll take the short side of 30 seconds.
> coon' is objectively a long standing racist slur.
In the US. Not even the whole of the US, but in some parts of the US.
> That some people ("a guy from South Africa", ffs) claimed not to know this
I wonder who is being a racist now. "South Africa ffs" and "claim not to know".
The world is much larger than the US and is not required to view everything through US issues.
> I invite you to go to any black neighborhood in the US
So, to quote myself: "The question is: who decides it is a slur especially in our global world? Somehow, increasingly, it's the white Americans who end up being offended on everyone's behalf."
> So, to quote myself: "The question is: who decides it is a slur especially in our global world? Somehow, increasingly, it's the white Americans who end up being offended on everyone's behalf."
The black people on the receiving end of “coon” would be the decision makers in this case.
And besides that, during the googling process of figuring out if the name is taken the negative connotations of this one would come up.
Anyway I’m working on a new terminal string styling library that I’ve named Colored which should be of some interest to you.
Agreed. While it might be debatable whether it's explicitly offensive, it's at least a bit of a grey area and it immediately stood out to me as a poor choice of name.
Whether you agree or not with the use of the term, names are part of communication, and communication that people are going to take issue with (rightly or wrongly) is going to have an impact on a product/project/business, and should probably be reconsidered, unless the point is to cause controversy or dogwhistle certain values.
This name for example would probably rule out use at many companies, and I suspect many would choose not to publicise it with things like conference talks.
The problem is that in the age of the internet, it's very difficult to find anything that someone, somewhere won't be offended by. Every time an organization or project gives in and alters its innocently-chosen name because a tiny minority takes offense, they further normalize outrageous outrage.
It's definitely a fine line to walk. There are names that originated in an offensive context, and it's easier for me to see the objection to those. But "lunatic" hasn't been commonly used in its offensive sense in nearly a century, so I don't think it's fair to stoke outrage towards a project that started in the 2020s and chose it for extremely innocent reasons.
> it's very difficult to find anything that someone, somewhere won't be offended by
Sure, but there's a big difference to the marketability of a product between whether 30% get a funny feeling that it's not a great name and won't promote via word of mouth, vs 0.0001% who are known for taking issue with a lot of stuff shouting about it in their echochamber.
> But "lunatic" hasn't been commonly used in its offensive sense in nearly a century
I think it was reasonable to refer to "lunatic asylums" or even "looney bins" until quite recently. The offensiveness may be less, and less targeted at individuals than it was 100 years ago, but it's still there.
"should probably be reconsidered" isn't exactly outrage is it? We can have sensible discussions about appropriate naming without being extreme one way or the other, as much as the internet seems to hate moderate discussion.
The word dramatically declined in popularity through the 19th century but started climbing again after ~1995[0]. The recent increase in usage is driven entirely by a much milder, colloquial meaning of "wildly foolish"[1].
I think being offended because our great-grandparents used the word literally is a bit silly.
[0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=lunatic&year_s...
[1] Meriam Webster identifies the older meaning as "dated": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lunatic