Loaded terms in free software

Posted Jun 20, 2020 10:53 UTC (Sat) by dottedmag (subscriber, #18590)
In reply to: Loaded terms in free software by Jandar
Parent article: Loaded terms in free software

There is another unacknowledged problem: problematic words will never end.

N- words were banned, and now "black" is a new N-word. After "black" will be banned another word will take on the same function and will be banned in turn.

Banning words won't help if the underlying problem is not addressed.

Loaded terms in free software

Posted Jun 20, 2020 19:42 UTC (Sat) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (8 responses)

Wrong. The N-word was banned because there was no non-perjorative use of it. Yes it's virtue signalling, but not to make me feel good because I'm woke enough not to use it. The real point of not using it is that it's very useful when I want to determine whether somebody is a racist Nazi shithead whom I won't want to have anything to do with. They only need to say that word.

You can't ban "black", it's a freakin' color. The association with white=good and black=bad, however, is fundamentally broken. It's beyond time to stop perpetuate that nonsense. Yes it's ingrained in our culture, but that's precisely the point.

Do NOT for a single moment assume that language doesn't shape thinking. For a completely unrelated example, ask people from various European countries what they associate with a bridge spanning a valley. You get answers which are strongly associated with either "grace" or "power", depending solely on whether that word happens to carry a female or male grammatical gender in their language.

Loaded terms in free software

Posted Jun 20, 2020 22:03 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

And if the language has no concept of gender associated with inanimate objects?

For example, although a ship has no gender, they are generally considered "she". But "my ship" is "he". And I wouldn't have a clue which of those two associations I would apply to a bridge.

Cheers,
Wol

Loaded terms in free software

Posted Jun 20, 2020 23:42 UTC (Sat) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link] (2 responses)

> You can't ban "black", it's a freakin' color.

And what do you think the so called N-word was before the ban?

Have you ever heard of Montenegro (black mountain)?

That a word has a simple descriptive meaning hasn't ever precluded a ban. And if a descriptive word is banned another word has to be used instead for describing the same thing and soon there is demand to ban the new word.

It is interesting that we have today arrived at the phrase "people of color". In my eyes this is one of the racists phrases I know of. It's basis is the construction of a fundamental divide between white and non-white whereas all non-white form an indistinctive mass with no further differentiation necessary.

Imagine you have a group of "people of color", Aborigines of Australia, African American, San people and whatever you think belongs to this group, and than you say to them: your differences are meaningless because you aren't white, being non-white is all you get as description.

One has to invent Level-5 to categorize this kind of underhand racism.

Loaded terms in free software

Posted Jun 21, 2020 0:46 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> And what do you think the so called N-word was before the ban?
> Have you ever heard of Montenegro (black mountain)?

Yeah, I happen to have a couple kilograms of "frijoles negros" (ie "black beans") in my pantry.

(Meanwhile, my English family name, if pronounced correctly, is a highly pejorative insult to a Turk!)

Loaded terms in free software

Posted Jun 22, 2020 15:12 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I think we should rename Nigeria!

:-)

Cheers,
Wol

Loaded terms in free software

Posted Jun 22, 2020 10:45 UTC (Mon) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]

> Wrong. The N-word was banned because there was no non-perjorative use of it.

In USA. In italian it was just a neutral descriptive term that got banned as well because of USA always exporting their culture abroad.

ungendered language

Posted Jun 23, 2020 9:15 UTC (Tue) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] (1 responses)

Chinese and Farsi (the primary language of Iran) are languages where there is no grammatical distinction between male and female *people*. In Iran, women do not traditionally take their husband's surnames upon marriage.

China and Iran are not known especially for their lack of sexism, however.

ungendered language

Posted Jun 23, 2020 10:31 UTC (Tue) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

So? I did not write that language is the only influence on people's thinking, much less the only influence that shapes sexist thinking.

In any case, our esteemed editor has kindly asked us to shut up now. Did you miss that?

Loaded terms in free software

Posted Jul 1, 2020 19:09 UTC (Wed) by danilo (guest, #57549) [Link]

"Black" to indicate "bad" is not at all unfounded: black or dark night is very understandable to be worse than a white/light day (good), and has deep history in very natural survival habits (it's so much easier to hunt but also to farm during the daylight, and that's food, right?).

What does not make any sense is calling people "black" or "white" because of their skin colour! I've never met a white person (my boy calls his hands to be "creamish"), nor did I meet a "black" one. But so far, that's exactly the same as white for daylight (it's not really white — black as absence of light reflection is actually pretty apt).

However, where it terribly falls apart is in calling descendants of "black" and "white" people exclusively "black". If that's not use of language reaffirming prejudiced stereotypes, I do not know what is.

So while I agree language can have an effect, I am surprised nobody worries about this particular issue which seems so much greater to me!

Loaded terms in free software

Posted Jun 22, 2020 13:09 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

This happens routinely to words with strong emotional connotation and always has (once upon a time it was religious words, then sexual words, now it's words relating to vicious oppression -- and horrible diseases, e.g. "cancer"). Guess what, we don't run out of words. Worrying about it is ridiculous. Language changes: live with it. This is such a change. The process is indeed incessant, and this instance is no worse than any other in the past.

(Do you get unhappy about the fact that you can't look at coneys hopping through the fields? Yes, a word as commonplace as "rabbit" was relatively rare until the late 19th century. And that spin of the euphemism treadmill wasn't even because "coney" was itself considered offensive, at least not in the UK: it's because it was *pronounced* the same way as a piece of anatomy that had itself caused many spins of the treadmill before then.)

The north-eastern US is going through a change in pronunciation almost as extreme as the Great Vowel Shift. Why not go and get all offended about that? It's much more linguistically significant than yet another change triggered by emotionally intense words in places people don't really *want* that emotional intensity.

Loaded terms in free software

Posted Jul 3, 2020 17:40 UTC (Fri) by dottedmag (subscriber, #18590) [Link]

You are mixing up language change and Red Guards roaming around ready to crucify anyone who does not subscribe to their word usage. What I'm arguing against is "cancel culture", not language change.

Fun and appropriate fact: Red Guards committees in Beijing decided that red traffic light for "stop" is un-communistic and decreed to change green/red meaning to opposite. As you can imagine, this decision was reverted shortly afterwards, but not only before thousands of people died.