> 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.
To me (without reading any of their stuff, I don't know if this is what they were shooting at), "lunatic" makes me think "high performance" and "this is a very difficult project with high payoff if we succeed, we're a little bit crazy (in a good way) to try, eh?".
> 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?
Spare us the BS. Society is very much able to form opinions on what is widely considered offensive and what is not.
Case in point: legal proceedings for libel, threats and so on. Turns out society still gives meaning to words.
> it's impossible to even be proven wrong
You've been proven wrong right now.