[funthree]

>whether people who do Hacker School will feel comfortable wanting to use the word to describe themselves

>and whether we would be alienating anyone who would otherwise enjoy coming to Hacker School.

Maybe you just need a big thesaurus and someone who has a good feeling for the political atmosphere of your group.

[misuba]

I could have sworn that something was in Hacker School's explicit social rules that specifically says to beware of solutions that contain the word "just." Turns out there's not, but: when you phrase things that way, you imply that a person is puzzled over something trivial.

Nope. Words are hard.

[funthree]

I didn't imply that it would be easy to understand the political atmosphere of the group, or that finding the words would be easy. From a different perspective it is essentially the same thing as asking everyone with a formal/informal survey, or observing the common phrases used. It could be done many different ways.