[robertlagrant]

> But telling people they should silently accept to use words rooted in a notion of social dominance

The paradox I've observed people disagreeing with is you either believe in words having magic powers that, such that even if no one knew these connotations they would still have them, or you believe in keeping old connotations alive precisely so you can tell people to stop using them because of the old connotations.

[psychoslave]

Telling people what their vocabulary can imply is one thing. Telling to others which word they might consider instead is a separate step, that can certainly be fine, don’t we agree?

Unilaterally telling others what words they must use is a domination mechanism, whoever engage in such a practice, don’t we agree?

If we don’t listen to what our words inspire to others, how can we know if it matches our intended meaning? If we don’t continuously hone our habits, including our language habits but definitely not only that, how can we progress as human individuals, collectives and societies?

>believe in words having magic powers that, such that even if no one knew these connotations they would still have them

The trick is simple to explain, isn’t it? We can perfectly be healthy carrier, and yet people will die from this virus we contributed to spread.

Just because something is untroublesome in our own specific case doesn’t mean it won’t contribute in the diffusion of something awful at societal level. That is, the only scale level at which we can measure how much benign or hurtful this thing is for humanity.

[TeMPOraL]

> The trick is simple to explain, isn’t it? We can perfectly be healthy carrier, and yet people will die from this virus we contributed to spread.

Except words aren't pathogens. They aren't complex molecular nanomachines that actively avoid our bodies' defenses while incidentally doing damage to it. The only effect they have is in what connotations they trigger in people. In this case, even if the word has troublesome origin, if approximately no one knows about it, then the person bringing up that connotation is the pathogen causing harm to people by convincing them to get worked up over a word, where they wouldn't before.

[psychoslave]

Words aren’t pathogens, indeed, pathogens are not that great to produce analogies and parables.

We can’t know what words will actually have on people until we release them. But we know that words we use can make a significant and measurable difference:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-minute-therapist...

https://brm.institute/neuroscience-behind-words/

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...

>if approximately no one knows about it

How close to "approximately no one knows about" are we in an antonym association like master/slave?

>the person bringing up that connotation is the pathogen

Well, that is what we can call focusing on the person rather than the social mechanism at stake, isn’t it? Kind of an equivalent to the mechanism through which we produce reactions like "look this bird of ill omen that pretends that there is an invisible entity passing from one person to an other but whose malign effect only reveal randomly, clearly this person is the actual cause of the issue".

[TeMPOraL]

> How close to "approximately no one knows about" are we in an antonym association like master/slave?

For some in the US and those adopting this particular aspect of its culture. For everyone else... well, there's some hundred other antonyms that come to mind before:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/master

Apprentice, amateur, loser, subordinate, subject, secondary, incompetent, inexperienced, junior - to list just a few. The only form of "master / slave" association people have - except for in the USA - is with the nomenclature used for IDE/SATA drive configuration in BIOS.

And that's in English alone. Other languages generally have their "master" equivalent disjoint from slavery or adjacent topics.

[themaninthedark]

Generally, these "conversations" have not been:

>Telling to others which word they might consider

Instead the pattern seems to be a group of people on Twitter/Mastadon/social media de jur all taking a quote and sharing talking about how awful it is that someone use the word "blah" in this day and age and how they are a horrible person and we should call up their work and get them fired...

Sometimes even completely misunderstanding what the person is talking about; as one of the first examples of this rousing to cancel people was a guy telling his friend that he would fork that code and someone misunderstood it to be sexual....followed by much ado about dongles.

[psychoslave]

Hey, thanks for the feedback, I’m glad I don’t spare any time in these platforms… :)

[robertlagrant]

It wasn't on any platform - the guy got fired for saying something at a conference, and the woman who sent the photo and tweet of him also got fired as she was a "developer evangelist" and her employer didn't think that would fit.