Loaded terms in free software

Posted Jun 19, 2020 14:20 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Loaded terms in free software by Wol
Parent article: Loaded terms in free software

There is a difference between changing the meaning of words and simply removing non-offensive uses from offensive words, and to conflate the two is a dangerous argument.

Saying that people are upset by meaningful jargon is different to saying that we should try to remove words that are offensive when used in some contexts from contexts where their offensive meaning is not intended. The distinction is that blacklist, slave and the like all have people who say that, as a consequence of the historical echoes of the 17th through 20th centuries in which slavery and racism were normal, they would prefer us to find less loaded terms, whereas (e.g.) RAM for computer main memory is not offensive, as it's meaningless outside the jargon context.

Loaded terms in free software

Posted Jun 19, 2020 15:12 UTC (Fri) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (4 responses)

You can't win this. The people who use these terms in "problematic" ways will just find some other inoffensive jargon to hijack. In five or ten years we'll find ourselves right back here, once again sacrificing a few more perfectly innocent words in hopes of appeasing that unfortunate vocal minority who cannot help but find reason to take offense wherever they look.

The best way to deal with the injuries of the past is to *let them heal*. Don't forget the history—we need to learn from the past so that we can do better in the future—but don't keep bringing it up in completely unrelated contexts. Let these "problematic" terms become blunted and repurposed as society evolves. A society where terms like "master" and "blacklist" carry no association whatsoever with slavery or racism, respectively, is a *far better* society than one where these concepts are deemed so relevant and urgent that they deserve their own exclusive terminology.

Loaded terms in free software

Posted Jun 19, 2020 16:06 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

But part of that is that each time they have to move on to new jargon, they shrink the group, because each movement onwards forces them to admit that they are not, in fact, speaking for the silent majority, but are a minority group themselves.

And my lived experience over the last 30 years is that to heal the injuries of the past, you either need society to confront them head-on (as the Truth and Reconciliation Committee did in South Africa), or you need to change language, at least for a while, so that you stop picking at the sores created by injustices. With the language shift, so that it's clear when we use these terms that we're discussing injustice, it becomes possible to have an open discussion and to fix the underlying problem.

Loaded terms in free software

Posted Jun 19, 2020 22:02 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (2 responses)

> In five or ten years we'll find ourselves right back here, once again sacrificing a few more perfectly innocent words in hopes of appeasing that unfortunate vocal minority who cannot help but find reason to take offense wherever they look.

Language has shifted in this fashion for hundreds if not thousands of years (see for example the various words meaning "a person with dark skin" that have been used over the years). Why stop now?

More to the point: What makes you believe it is *possible* to stop now? Do you imagine we will set up an English equivalent to the Académie Française, that will review every proposed change to the language, and issue recommendations that everyone will ignore (see https://xkcd.com/1726/)? I tend to imagine most of us could find a less Sisyphean use of our time.

Loaded terms in free software

Posted Jun 20, 2020 1:52 UTC (Sat) by milesrout (subscriber, #126894) [Link] (1 responses)

>Do you imagine we will set up an English equivalent to the Académie Française, that will review every proposed change to the language, and issue recommendations that everyone will ignore (see https://xkcd.com/1726/)?

But that's the problem: that's what people are trying to do to English. Except instead of language experts doing it, it's woke American "liberals" (poor use of terminology by the Americans there, because there's nothing actually liberal in the traditional sense of the word about restricting what words people can use, that's authoritarian) on Twitter telling people what language they're allowed to use, then calling them racist if they don't comply.

Loaded terms in free software

Posted Jun 20, 2020 6:27 UTC (Sat) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

Yes, languages are under the control of the speakers, not the experts, exactly as my comment describes. People are organically expressing their displeasure at hearing a given word, and sooner or later it will become unacceptable. You can't really stop that from happening. It's a natural linguistic process that has happened a thousand times before and will happen a thousand times hence.

Loaded terms in free software

Posted Jun 19, 2020 19:56 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

"RAM for computer main memory"

Except in my example it is NOT main memory. Have you ever come across a consumer laptop with main memory measured in terabytes?

Cheers,
Wol

Loaded terms in free software

Posted Jun 20, 2020 1:56 UTC (Sat) by milesrout (subscriber, #126894) [Link]

>simply removing non-offensive uses from offensive words

The word 'master' is not offensive. The word 'slave' is not offensive. *Slavery* is offensive, but it's not the *word* slavery that's offensive but the *practice* that is offensive. 'Blacklist' is not offensive. Literally the only thing I can imagine that anyone could find offensive about it is that it is derived from the word 'black' to mean negative or evil. But that's a fundamental cultural association that all English speakers have regardless of race, and has nothing to do with race, you're not going to erase it, and it's got nothing to do with American racial terms like 'black people'. American concepts of race don't even have any biological or scientific basis they're literally meaningless. For example see the Americans trying to work out what race that guy Zimmerman was. Is he 'latino' or 'white'? Are people from Spain white? Are people from Mexico white? It depends on the weather, it seems.