No, that's the complete opposite of what I said.
Please read again. The part where I said that the underlying message is "you are wrong, you should feel bad, you're not allowed to use the thing you were wrong about anymore".
If the message had been "you're wrong about something, here's the truth, now make up your own mind about whether you want to keep using it", I'd be completely on board with the article. My decision would probably be that I'm gonna keep using the phrase because all of linguistics is built on misunderstandings, mistranslations, and downright lies, so avoiding every phrase that has "bad" origins is a step on the road to 1984. But that's just like, my opinion, man. You can decide otherwise and we can all get along just fine.
I don't like arbitrary language policing, either. I think there was a much stronger case for eliminating "master"/"slave" than "master branch", for instance, and if people were to argue for eliminating "mastery" as well I'd consider that ridiculous. It's fine if you don't consider this particular argument persuasive, but if it's a step toward Ingsoc we've all already been sprinting in that direction for centuries.
All good and admirable, but
when I meet someone from the States and say I'm Italian, it usually ends up like this
https://www.alessandravita.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/12...
or this
https://static1.thegamerimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uplo...
or with a combo
https://preview.redd.it/italian-stereotypes-starter-pack-v0-...
It's not the words or the metaphors, it's the people!
If someone wants to use words against someone else, they'll find a way, no matter what.
Policing words is fascist, if anything, police people bad behaviour, actually, police how your society works and start investigating why you you masterfully created, nourished and spread to the World so many cultural stereotypes about everyone who is not you and doesn't want to be like you! They talk to us about you, it's not the words you use, but *how* you use them.
Try to understand that thinking "you person of color -> you bad" it's not any better than thinking "you [n word] -> you bad".
This sort of phrasing of one’s opinion is as old as essays and speeches themselves, as far as I know. Here is an english translation of a speech by Cicero, the one from which our good old lorem ipsum placeholder text was derived.
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cicero/de...
Of course it is sensible for a person to have an opinion on the conduct of others, and to express that opinion. Where is the problem?
Unless said author was in a position of power over me I would understand the “we should X” phrasing as kind of like… the standard way that opinions have been expressed throughout history…
"I think that people should do XYZ"
The reader knows that this is your opinion. They may reasonably presume these are your opinions and that you are not writing the essay at gunpoint or while under the influence of alien mind control. Furthermore, no reasonable reader would mistake your opinion for some sort of imperative they are compelled to obey.
(Now, I hope this isn't misconstrued to mean that all opinions should be expressed authoritatively and imperatively. That is not always the right tone.)
It's the word equivalent of numerology
I won't say that. As much as I frown upon the holier-than-thou attitude plaguing talks on social justice topics, the words we use do have influence on how we think and act.
Thankfully, there are many countries outside the US where this sort of 1984-style language policing is not accepted and we'll continue "clinging" to our "legacy terms", tyvm.
- Someone who has mastered some art;
- A teacher;
- The lead artisan in a team, the one who has mastered the art, teaches and leads.
The slave master is a very narrow interpretation on these meanings, and the woke push against the word is myopic. The word has a long history, none of it connected to slavery.
As for American English, wake me up when they rename Master's degree.
And yet, weirdly to me, there's a lot of people acting like it costs them personally to switch words.
I never gave this topic much thought when it first came up, because it never mattered to me in the fist place if the default branch was called "master" or "A1" or "πρώτα".
Someone wants it called different because of aesthetics? Sure, have fun with the new name! It's no more significant to me than "jif" (the cleaning fluid) being renamed "cif", or Marathon, Snickers.
Of course, if anyone were to have suggested to me that the name alone would be enough to solve racism forever, I might have pointed that the Berlin Wall's official name translated as "anti-fascist protection barrier", as an example of the way people use words to divert from a complete lack of real action or worse to act in direct opposition to the normal meaning of the words.
I don't think this concept is unique to Portuguese. Whenever anyone talks about, say, the dutch masters, they are not talking about slavery.
FWIW some of us in the USA will also continue using the original words as they were intended rather than injecting social issues into language and trying to control people with compelled speech. I for one put all the words back when people swap them out by using FoxReplace for Firefox, Word Replacer II for Chrome and nobody even notices unless I happen to quote them. The people trying to control language are quite selective. For example they have chosen not to tamper with "Masters Degree" but they will change master everywhere else.
This is the silliest, pettiest, snowflakiest thing I've seen in a while.
"Words can't hurt you" say people who are so upset that languages change through various means (yes even intentional! Ask the French) that they go out of their way to edit other people's content to say what they would rather it say.
It's really funny to decry 1984 Ingsoc as you actively rewrite your individual view of reality to conform to your sensibilities, as if that isn't exactly the same ideology.
Partially agreed. I am silly and petty in response to other people trying to force BDSM on me. They try to force everyone into Domination, Submission and Humiliation so I neuter their pseudo mind-rape and teach others how to do the same.
Why don’t we spend energy on getting to the issues we actually care about instead of standing on shaky arguments and calling it a day. It’s lazy thinking.
_late Old English mægester "a man having control or authority over a place; a teacher or tutor of children," from Latin magister (n.) "chief, head, director, teacher"_
So if we dislike the user of master, do we ban whip? Or any other term negatively associated with slavery that actually predates it? I think the actual answer is contextual, and in the context of git, there is no relation to slavery whatsoever for most of the worlds populace
The reason: because it was easier, it allowed corporations (especially Microsoft) to give the appearance of making social change, and because it distracted us from dealing with the real issues. In other words, laziness.
And you know what, if you're firmly on the progressive left, as I am, that's no big deal. It's annoying, maybe it alienates me from taking part in social action. But it won't, for example, change who I vote for.
However, we (the West) live in a period of history balanced on a narrow edge between social progression and social regression, with all manner of bad actors waiting on the wings to take advantage of our slipups. And this was a slipup, no matter how well meaning the people who pushed it through were. This, and many, many other small annoyances, were in all likelihood what it took to push a significant number of people to change their vote in the recent election. It's not the only reason, perhaps not even the main one. But any change is significant when you're balanced on an edge.
But also, small things do have to change. If nothing changes, the status quo remains, and the status quo is stacked against many people. (Because of gender, race, culture, wealth, location, etc). It's easy to say "focus on the big things" but the small things can change along the way too.
I'm strongly in favor of progressive social change. But when even the smallest of change takes this much effort and leaves people frustrated and alienated, we should not be focusing this much effort on insignificant changes. It's like trickle down economics - hundreds of minor changes like this will not trickle down into large changes. Most likely the opposite - they'll alienate and infuriate enough people over time to cause a societal swing in the other direction.
If we're gonna put effort like this into bringing about change, let's make it meaningful, something that effects our daily lives now.
There is nothing progressive about any of that.
I also recognize that in all of these things, balance and nuance are required and conflicts are common and won't always be resolved in a way that makes me, personally, satisfied.
> forcing language
This entire thread is a majority of people, on a generally quite progressive forum, arguing strongly against forced language change. I do not believe that the majority of genuinely progressive people want or believe in forced language changes, with the exception of a few specific ethnic and gender based slurs.
Thanks for making my point.
That is, in fact, a reason to ignore them. Even if you agree it's a problem (I don't), triage is important. Use your social capital on solving problems of importance, not on annoying people with solutions to minor problems.
[Citation needed], as they'd say on Wikipedia.
I don't think that's the origin at all. Why do you?
Some decent examples here - https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=26504086
Googling "Master Slave audio manual" has a bunch of examples. E.g. this manual from 1959 - https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Catalogs/Ampex/Amp...
Though that Ampex manual isn't all that convincing in this context, IMO. It's about the hardware level, all capacitors and oscillators and stuff, in "master" and "slave" amplifying circuits. That has pretty much nothing at all to do with "master tape" per se; it's more like "master" and "slave" hydraulic cylinders in the clutch or brake system of your car.
Your HN link feels like a much better argument here. (Though I admit I haven't followed any of the links in it yet; going just by the quoted bits in the comment.)
As someone who has recently been converting our branches to use main everywhere because they were previously a horrid mix, I don't care what American politics thinks is linguistically problematic today. In other dialects where the word master is more common, it's not a problem any more than the word "owner" is a problem. I feel roughly the same way about changing master to main as my Guatemalan friend feels about the word "Latinx": I don't want someone making $350k in San Francisco telling me how problematic it is to speak my own language.
Take "owner". What’s a product owner in a SCRUM terminology? Is that the person that when leaving the company will keep full exclusive (or even communal) rights on the product? Or is that just corporate novlang to put motivation/pressure on the "wage slave" (to honor/take/loan/steal vocabulary from an other extremity of social perspective)?
I would guess that 90% of phrases and proverbs used in any language fall into that category.
As I understood from the article, "cargo cults" exactly as in the widely-used metaphor did exist; it's just that they were a small minority of what anthropologists call "cargo cults".
So it seems to me it's you who are being not only spiteful and petty but above all, just plain wrong.
For example:
Offer wage negotiation coaching to the bottom x% of earners in any given position in the company (or just straight up give raises to them unprompted). Such initiatives will by definition disproportionately help disproportionately disadvantaged demographics without codifying systemic racism/sexism/etc. The reason corporations don't do things like this is because they are interested in scoring brownie points without undermining the status quo class related power structures.
Similarly when providing scholarships, don't limit them to certain ethnicities. Doing so tends to mostly favor the members of the given ethnic group who are already well off. Instead make the scholarship inversely proportional to household income and select applicants randomly weighted by 1/income without regard to skin color.
Build community centers and libraries in poor communities regardless of who lives there. Give money to the ACLU and other organizations that help victims of abuse rather than tweeting a rainbow flag in June while simultaneously organizing an industry event in Saudi Arabia.
And above all, without incurring any actual monetary costs. (Unprompted raises??? Muahahahahaa!)
> Offer wage negotiation coaching to the bottom x% of earners in any given position in the company (or just straight up give raises to them unprompted)
1. What positions rate this treatment?
2. when do you stop doing this?
for example: you should learn that main and master mean absolutely nothing to 95% of the people of the World. In my language "master" translates to maestro, which predates US slavery and symbolizes something completely positive: a master of some - usually artistically relevant - craft with followers that branched from the original (like the master branch in git). they are just labels to us,, if you are offended by that, there are a lot of other ways to cope than attack people who don't care about them and rightfully so.
Even in English, the term "master" branch has nothing to do with slavery. It originates from a master audio recording, usually just referred to as a master, from which other recordings are made.
Late Old English mægester "a man having control or authority over a place; a teacher or tutor of children," from Latin magister (n.) "chief, head, director, teacher" (source of Old French maistre, French maître, Spanish and Italian maestro, Portuguese mestre, Dutch meester, German Meister), contrastive adjective ("he who is greater") from magis (adv.) "more," from PIE mag-yos-, comparative of root meg- "great." The form was influenced in Middle English by Old French cognate maistre.
Exactly. Which is also (what at least I think) where "master copy", which has been claimed to be the origin of git's "master branch" comes from. Whether via the music industry's "master tape" as claimed elsewhere in this discussion, or more directly from the "master's manuscript" all the other monks duplicated in a mediaeval monastery's scriptorium, who knows... But zero to do with slavery, AFAICS.
This is not to say it’s fine to make ad hominem attacks to anyone on its vocabulary. But telling people they should silently accept to use words rooted in a notion of social dominance, doesn’t seem any better. There is a difference on pointing every occurrence of social practices that favor the spread of a domination system, and blaming personally the people who instantiate these practices.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
could be, but...
most words are rooted in a notion of social dominance and only carry a a notion of social dominance when used in the context of expressing social dominance (to oppress or abuse of other people).
words like reign or empire or dictator are absolutely rooted in a notion of social dominance, but we accept that it's completely fine if we use them as a metaphor or as an hyperbole. If someone gets offended, it's their fault.
Some example:
- 2013 was the year in which the reign of Federer at the top of the men's game had supposedly come to an end
- Amazon empire: the rise and reign of Jeff Bezos
- Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, has been called a benevolent dictator for life
Most, I don’t know really, that would need a lot of statistics, but we can certainly agree that a significant portion of the vocabulary pertaining to social matter do.
>words like reign or empire or dictator are absolutely rooted in a notion of social dominance, but we accept that it's completely fine if we use them as a metaphor or as an hyperbole.
Yes, sure, when the context is appropriate, we totally agree. We might lake enough proper bandwidth with flat text alone to discuss that properly though. :D I’m confident it would be far easier to have a conversation on that topic topic around some drinks and laughs for example.
That said, in all example given here, the connection to the toxic social attitudes are obvious.
Every competition-focused sport is rooted in the parable of imposing one dominance on an other, carrying a supremacist perspective with it. That’s why for example yoga competitions will be controversial, while it tennis is not.
As for the two latter celebrities, they don’t really have a reputation of being paragons of empathy that we can point to and say "if everyone would act like this in its interpersonal relationships, humanity would live in gentle bliss and harmony." To be more precise, I don’t know them personally, this remark is really not about these individuals, but more on pointing that in these specific cases, the matching reputation doesn’t serve well the point of uses in metaphoric or hyperbolic ways.
Believe me.
You wanna know something funny?
The word used in Latin for betrayal (tradunt from which derives tradimento in Italian) at its origins meant "to give, transfer, deliver"
When the Christians came to be, they changed its meaning to something bad because Judas "gave Jesus away".
A simple innocent word has become the quintessence of being an awful person because of a stupid religious myth that also started one of the many persecutions of the Jews.
So beware of changing the meaning of words or advocating for their removal from the public discourse, you'll never know who's gonna be hurt by it.
> the connection to the toxic social attitudes are obvious
the only thing that is obvious is that they are only hyperboles, Amazon is not an Empire, Linus Torvalds is not a dictator and Federer did not actually reign over anything.
I would also argue that Linus has been seen as "benevolent" and I really wanna know from you where the connection to the toxic social attitudes lies when we talk about Federer's reign.
It's obvious to me that the sentence was referring to "the king of mens' tennis" (as a metaphor, do you know what they are?) to celebrate him and not to some literal evil ruler who should be dethroned, with the use of the force if necessary.
It’s not like it’s a call to act in any extreme way. Actually, the comment doesn’t even mention anything that one should do.
We can listen to other feelings and interpretations of our words even with zero etymological consideration at stake. But if we try to deny their feeling that some word is derogative and back our perspective on lexical neutrality, maybe we might double check we are not missing some well documented semantics of the word and its history.
That said, given the number of downvotes, it looks like I miss some contextual clues about what it might make it feels as some call to extremist POV.
And really, you're bothered by the idea that 'main' is a more neutral name for the default branch of a git repository, and want to cling to 'master', when that term has traditionally been used to describe someone who enslaves other humans? Really? You're that attached to something like a default branch name in a VCS? Or you aren't, but because it sounded like people were trying to make you feel bad about yourself for using 'master', you're just going to be obstinate and own those libs?
All that seems kinda spiteful and petty. You do you, I guess.