[jychang]

Being removed for versions 25 to 38… honestly confirms the feminist narrative of some people being idiots, though.

Like, imagine documentation on object oriented programming being removed because it offended some functional programming folks.

[austin-cheney]

I am not aware of actual code removal but skirting in that direction there was a movement, just a couple years back, to replace words that had become more offensive than they were in the recent past. One example is renaming master to main.

I am not stating any opinion for or against any words or terms in this context.

[pron]

Somewhat on a tangent, but when people talk about offensive language in the context of cultural criticism they don't mean terms that cause the people who hear them to be offended but things that may diminish the value of some people in the eyes of the people who hear them. I.e. something is offensive, in this sense, to some group X not if people in group X are offended when they themselves are exposed to it but if people who hear it may come to devalue people in group X. Whether it actually does or does not is another matter. In that sense, the discussion of the clitoris in an anatomy book is not offensive in the same way as the term master, but its absence is. Its inclusion could be offensive in the sense of scandalising some people who see it, but it's not the same sense.

[dotancohen]

My grandfather was a slave - he passed in 2007. I have no objection to the term master, nor have I heard anybody ever who was affected by actual slavery to take offence to the term.

I remember much debate about this, and not once was an actual affected person mentioned who took offence.

[pron]

1. My whole point was that it is not about anyone in the affected group taking offence. The question is whether other people can come to devalue people in the affected group. In this context "offensive" doesn't mean taking offence, but devaluing. To take and extreme and controved example, if I tell a subordinate that the women on our team were "diversity hires" who did not deserve to be hired, the harm is not in a woman hearing I said that. It is done even if none of the women on the team ever know I said that. Similarly, it doesn't matter if the women on our team all agreed with that statement and weren't offended by it.

2. I make absolutely no claim about the effectiveness of using or avoiding certain terms even in the relevant context. I'm only saying that people misunderstand what "offensive" means in this context. It means things that may make some people think less of others, whether or not those others know about it or are offended by it.

[didibus]

I think OP explicitly said that it's not about the affected party feeling offended, but about how it makes you look to choose such words.

Think bad PR, not actual people complaining due to being offended. Like if I named my code library dead babies, it's possible nobody whose delt with a dead baby finds offense to it, but many people might find it off putting that I've chosen to call it that. So if I was a high value corporate entity who doesn't want bad PR, I might want to rename it.

I think in the end it's more of a, oh damn, did I just make a master/slave analogy for my database design? Maybe someone will find that offensive, and I don't want that, so I'll rename it as a precaution, even if no one has yet to let me know it's offending them.

[aj_hackman]

The anti-master position also willfully disregards synonymy. Just because I have mastered the English language does not mean it belongs to me. Master Splinter does not own the Ninja Turtles.

[austin-cheney]

I cannot own the perspectives and unspoken histories of other people, nor will I try. Trying to do so ultimately only results in shades of self-censorship or poor imitation.

Instead I will do my best to balance my language between brevity and specificity while hoping my instructions are clear, direct, and honest for the audience. Everything else is left to chance.

I have found over the years, the degree of my communication's success is left more to the particularities and desires of group thought from a given audience than from the words themselves. I come to this conclusion through numerous times of providing the same communication, verbatim, to difference audiences and watching the wildly differing results.

If I lived by commission I suspect I would alter my behavior. Instead, I manage a software team for a living.

[pron]

I wasn't trying to suggest how individuals should behave nor claim that language has a large impact on social dynamics in general. I'm merely saying that in the context of cultural criticism the thing that is sometimes referred to as "offensive language" doesn't mean language that may insult or offend the sensiblities of those who hear it but language that may seem to make those who hear it think less of others. I don't know if this is useful or silly, but that is what it means.

[BugsJustFindMe]

This is insightful. Thank you.

[augusto-moura]

Renaming things to better names happens all the time, selectively removing something is much worse. Especially for a reference book like Gray's Anatomy

[austin-cheney]

The severity of harm is highly subjective, though I do agree with you about the harm. The more important thing is the intent, which completely underscores that severity.

[tbossanova]

Main is also an easier name for beginners. I’m old school and always got the comparison of master branch to master tapes and such things, but people new to this stuff wouldn’t necessarily have the same intuition about the name. Main is just clearer (for now). Similar to blacklist/whitelist. I had no context for either of those and it took me soooooo long to remember what they meant. Allowlist/denylist is just so much clearer. Any reduction in harm, however tiny, is a nice bonus to just making things clearer for more people

[bigstrat2003]

No, blacklist and whitelist are far superior because blacklist is a normal English word. It isn't even a term of art, programmers just adopted a word that already existed in the English language (and used whitelist by way of analogy). The argument that the new terms are better holds no water whatsoever. The old terms were superior.

[Jarwain]

How is "allowlist" or "denylist" not more clear to, say, someone for whom English is a second language?

Sure blacklist was already an English word, but it's not necessarily _common_, and the distinction between blacklist and whitelist is kinda arbitrary. If you'd like to explain Why the word means what it does I'd love to hear it

Allowlist and denylist are clearer, in that the meaning is in more clear alignment with the words it's made up of.

The old terms just make more sense to those who are old enough to be used to it.

[lelanthran]

Dunno about whitelist, but blacklist had the same meaning for hundreds of years.

[ciupicri]

This master tape thing didn't even cross my mind. subversion used trunk. git used master which sounded way better for me. End of story. They're just words, non-native words for me.

As for whitelist and blacklist, I don't remember having any difficulties with them. Maybe on the first encounter, but that's it.

[bigstrat2003]

It's not even "was", that movement still exists. People are still out there trying to remove terms of art on the basis of the theoretical offense felt by an extreme minority of people. It's ridiculous.

[IAmBroom]

Or, it's thoughtful and considerate.

Potato, potahto.

[wat10000]

That's not even remotely similar.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

> Like, imagine documentation on object oriented programming being removed because it offended some functional programming folks.

Let's not pretend we are fundamentally different from people living in other epochs, just biases change. We literally changed branch names of git repos because some people in one big country felt the naming could be offensive to another group of people.

[voxl]

I think it communicates maliciousness not idiocy

[amirhirsch]

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. If you are the editor of Gray’s Anatomy, incompetence is malice.

[SecretDreams]

> incompetence is malice

A subtle distinction, but I'd flip this as "malice is incompetence".

[entropicdrifter]

Both ring true, in this case.

[cheschire]

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

[voxl]

Keep word: adequately. This is not adequately explained by stupidity.

[Larrikin]

It feels like lately there are people committing malice knowingly trying to justify it as just a joke or unknowingly doing something from stupidity to make it more palatable to people that will then excuse them.

I think this rule may have always been fake when anyone with even a little bit of power did it.

[chris_wot]

It does occur to me that you can be both malicious and stupid at the same time.

[euroderf]

"Ripped from the headlines!"

[TheOtherHobbes]

I've never understood why this is taken seriously. Law has clear concepts of bad faith and mens rea, and this implies they're irrelevant.

Of course it's unproductive to start from assumptions of bad faith, which is a fair point. Bad faith requires evidence of intent, stupidity doesn't.

But there are still situations where bad faith is a reasonable hypothesis to test. And some negative actors are clever enough to operate deliberately inside a zone of plausible deniability.

[davorak]

> adequately explained by stupidity

What is the adequate explanation via stupidity in this case though? If there is one that sure maybe we should lean that way without further evidence.

[Applejinx]

This gets complicated when the malicious have also read the saying and intentionally feign stupidity, but that's just chaos politics.

[mhh__]

There is obviously truth to it but it does not confirm the whig interpretation i.e. it was supposedly _removed_ rather than never present

[pfannkuchen]

This might be the first casual reference I've seen to whig history, is that memeplex picking up steam?

[lopsotronic]

Back in the Aughts a large number of home-schooling and educational reform organizations (leaning heavily on the Fundamentalist side of the Christian spectrum) had apparently determined that Set Theory originated in Socialist / Bisexual circles.

"A Beka Book" (now styled "Abeka") was not just the province of homeschoolers, but made its way into the educational and academic curricula in many higher learning institutions.

Unlike "modern math" theorists who believe mathematics is a creation of man and thus arbitrary and relative, A Beka Book teaches that the laws of mathematics are a creation of God and thus absolute, and that A Beka Book provides texts that are not burdened with modern ideas such as Set Theory.

It would have made a great deal less fuss if it didn't turn out that Abeka books were being bought in their thousands with tax dollars. I suppose this sort of thing would barely raise an eyebrow these days. I've been seeing far more avante garde ideas flowing forth in the public-funded wells of the former Confederacy of late.