Other examples:

- "master"/"slave" terminology in databases and such; most recently, even the "master" branch in source trees was deemed impious, and GitHub will be renaming it by default to "main" on new repos starting tomorrow

- there was a recent case where the author of RuboCop (a linter for Ruby, a pun on RoboCop) faced a lot of pressure to rename it because, I guess, cops are now considered verboten (!?): https://metaredux.com/posts/2020/06/08/the-rubocop-name-dram...

- adding codes of conduct to all public-facing projects, most of which are taken directly from the Contributor Covenant (a safely orthodox choice); this isn't a naming thing, but is pushed for in a similar way by similar people

For the people who have not watched the movie, the hilarious thing is that RoboCop is anti-police, anti-corporate, anti-autoritarian and anti-dystopian.

But since woke people are corporate, authoritarian and dystopian, I can see why they would object to the name.

Holy shit. That was a wild ride, and in the worst way possible.

Here’s the full lost of banned words at twitter and other woke companies / opensource projects. https://twitter.com/TwitterEng/status/1278733305190342656?s=...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/realestate/master-bedroom... ‘Master bedroom’ is racist now.

It's the most recent and thus the most salient one for a lot of people in software. There are many other examples of neutral terminology that's become politically charged: "all lives matter", "color-blind", the OK hand gesture...

I completely agree that none of these rules are individually taxing and that the consequences of breaking them are unlikely to be severe. But when taking everything in aggregate - the sum of all the rules I know about, the concern that there could be new rules I don't know about, the tiny but not unprecedented chance that I could face severe fallout - the net effect is stifling. Again, not the most important problem in the world or even the most important problem I personally face, but still a problem.

"All lives matter" is not and has never been neutral.

"All lives matter" is a natural English sentence expressing the idea that every person's life matters. This is not a particularly controversial idea.

I recognize that it's also a non-neutral political slogan, and that modern speech conventions require people to avoid saying things that sound like controversial political slogans. But that's precisely the problem! I have to keep up to date with all major partisan controversies, a task I generally find quite miserable and pointless, in order to know which new phrases I should avoid!

If that isn't, what is?

non sequitur.

You just don’t ever know how it will interpreted against you forcing an apology or more recently a written declaration that you are sexist/racist/etc and that you will “do better”.