[handoflixue]

Surely it matters the extent of the harm, though? If I'm doing home wiring, it is not at all helpful to know "this could result in a slight tingle or kill you and burn your house down."

Ambiguity means I can wave off your complaints because clearly what you're complaining about is a hangnail. Ambiguity means I can punish you brutally, because how dare you not take my car crash seriously.

[vineyardmike]

Stairs are really hard for people in a wheelchair, signage is really hard for someone blind, and fire alarms are really hard for someone deaf. Missing any of those ADA adaptions is more harmful to one group than another.

Harm can vary based on the person, so doing something "harmful" is person dependent. The goal is to recognize the harmful history of language when choosing words, because, thankfully all spoken words are newly spoken, so you can pick fresh each time.

[lolinder]

In a huge portion of these cases the only harmful history is in the imagination of the author. "Tarball"? "Red team"? "Submit"? "White paper"?

All of these have very clear etymologies that don't have any offensive history whatsoever. The idea that we should avoid any term that uses the words "white", "black", "red", or "yellow" on the grounds that they once were used in some contexts to refer to people is absurd.