Too late. HR has been moving to make us to stop using: blacklist, whitelist, sanity check, and master. It's a frighteningly difficult exercise in doublethink to take a required security course (produced by a third party) that refers to blacklist and whitelist and then having to self censor your own peer discussions about it.

> master

Like three times I've had to figure out what is wrong with my git repo because Xcode switched the default branch from 'master' -> 'main'. Tutorials everywhere no longer work, etc.

We've managed to add even more pointless but required knowledge to programming. Ironically it's the newbies who suffer the most.

------------

A few days ago in the AsciiDoc mailing list – there was an effort to try to find a new word for "whitespace" (obviously the "white" comes from paper, how you even think of race in this context baffles me).

We had a politician say "amen and awomen” not too long ago. And he’s ordained in some fashion.

We all want off this crazy ride.

It was a joke.

It's so weird for me to see people complaining about hypersensitivity get so up in arms about a pun.

I just find it so hilariously hypocritical for the crowds that constantly complain about the over-policing of speech to find a light-hearted pun to be so dastardly offensive.

To each their own I guess, but a simple pun doesn't feel like the biggest threat we face...

It's weird for me to imagine people who would be outraged about a joke that played on, for example, a racial stereotype, using "It was a joke." as a defence.

Perhaps you're not such a person, and are not speaking on behalf of such people, but I think that saying "It was a joke." doesn't really address the issue that some people's offensive speech is being silenced, while others' is being celebrated.

I think some jokes can be offensive and other jokes can be not offensive at all. I think that's a subjective call that we all make on a case by case basis.

I think people are well within their rights to tell jokes, and I think others are well within their rights to criticize jokes that they find offensive.

I think if people want to play in the marketplace of ideas, they should wear a helmet because nothing says the marketplace of ideas has to be welcome to any given idea. If you tell a joke, then don't be surprised when people react to your joke.

I also didn't see _any_ criticism that the pastor's joke was offensive. I didn't see any public figures indicating that they were offended by the joke. I just saw people calling him insane, a moron, and an idiot for not knowing that "amen" didn't refer to a singular male person.

> I also didn't see _any_ criticism that the pastor's joke was offensive.

As the article[0] that you linked in another comment made clear in its title: "Some were offended". (Strangely the headline of the article is different from the title, but I think the title is still accurate).

[0] https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/the...

While the article's HTML title does claim some were "offended", neither the headline nor the body of the article included the word "offended", or "offense".

There's not a single quote or statement in that article from a person saying that they found it offensive.

I need a source slightly stronger than the title element of an article that is entirely unsupported to be convinced that there were people offended.

All that being said, I would take more seriously the concerns of someone who was deeply religious that said they found it offensive to make a flippant joke during a prayer than I would the concerns of people who called him a moron for not getting the joke. I still haven't seen anyone say they were offended by the joke, though.

I don't know why you think the journalist just made up their conclusion, but here are a few examples of people finding it insulting / offensive:

"The idea of throwing in a pun, though not a federal crime, is poor form at best and can be viewed as flippant and insulting."[0]

"He has singularly demonstrated the ability to offend everyone possible while reciting what he deemed to be a politically correct prayer calling for unity."[1]

"many are offended on behalf of their politics. ... Instead, let’s be offended and furious on behalf of our God."[2]

I personally think that undermining religious language and activities like prayer, by deliberately misinterpreting and butchering words, is offensive in the same way that burning a flag is (even though I don't think that should be illegal either).

[0] https://www.dailyregister.com/lifestyle/20210113/david-otten...

[1] https://standard-democrat.com/story/2858446.html

[2] https://onwardinthefaith.com/amen-and-a-woman-a-biblical-per...

> I don't know why you think the journalist just made up their conclusion

First, I didn't say the journalist made up their conclusion. I stated I hadn't seen evidence of it.

Second, I don't really believe a journalist is in control of the headline and I *certainly* don't think the journalist is in control of the title element of the web version of their article. If it's not in the body of the article, I don't ascribe it to the journalist, but rather an editor.

> by deliberately misinterpreting and butchering words, Third, I don't think puns are a deliberate misinterpretation of a word at all. It's a play on words that relies on similar sounds of words, but a pun doesn't "interpret" a word. If I say: "What does the fish say when it hits a wall? Dam!" I haven't "misinterpreted" the word "dam" to be an exclamation of surprise. I have made a pun based on the fact that the words "damn" and "dam" sound alike.

> I personally think that undermining religious language and activities like prayer

That's fair. Like I said, I take more seriously the concerns of people who are offended by the concept of making a joke during prayer. I'm willing to hear out those that say that prayer is not an appropriate place for jokes. I do, however, essentially discard and disregard the opinion of anyone that says that the pastor is a moron, or an idiot for not understanding the word "amen".

Basically, it boils down to this: if someone understands it is a joke, and think a joke in that place is offensive, I'm willing to hear you out. If someone doesn't understand that it's a joke, and are mad about the "politically correct" nature of his words, then I don't think they understand the situation properly and ignore their concerns.

> "many are offended on behalf of their politics. ... Instead, let’s be offended and furious on behalf of our God."[2]

This quote seems taken out of context from the onwardinthefaith article. The outrage that they are expressing is expressly not at the joke. Rather, the thing they find offensive and enraging is this contained in this quote:

"We ask it in the name of the monotheistic God and Brahma and God known by many names by many different faiths."

Yes, they note the flippancy of the "amen and awomen" joke, but only really find it offensive in light of his prior comments. They are offended and enraged at the nod toward universalism, and the pun at the end of the prayer confirms that in their opinion he lacks the appreciation for the Lord's majesty.

> Basically, it boils down to this: if someone understands it is a joke, and think a joke in that place is offensive, I'm willing to hear you out. If someone doesn't understand that it's a joke, and are mad about the "politically correct" nature of his words, then I don't think they understand the situation properly and ignore their concerns.

Thank you, I think we agree then.

> Yes, they note the flippancy of the "amen and awomen" joke, but only really find it offensive in light of his prior comments.

Yes, unfortunately it is difficult to isolate one's feeling of being offended from the context in which the words are spoken, which means if someone says multiple potentially offensive things it can be difficult to decide how much offence each word caused.

Where was it a joke? A source for this please?

Some sources:

- https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/the...

- https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2021/jan/10/growing-old-ungrace...

> “I concluded with a lighthearted pun in recognition of the record number of women who will be representing the American people in Congress during this term as well as in recognition of the first female Chaplain of the House of Representatives whose service commenced this week,” said Cleaver, who led the search committee that selected Grun Kibben, the former chief chaplain of the Navy, for the role.

> “I personally find these historic occasions to be blessings from God for which I am grateful.”

The AsciiDoc example is an interesting one as I've not seen really any discussion about "whitespace" as offensive and cannot really find anything. Add onto the fact that stuff like wikipedia also still refers to it as whitespace as so it does seem like they're going to define their own term for AsciiDoc that'll be at odds with broader community and just begs for newbie confusion.

“In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words -- in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/553001-it-s-a-beautiful-thi...

The fact that main is 33% shorter and more descriptive should be argument enough for it to be the new default, regardless of any issues surrounding sensitivity. You should be able to still set the default to whatever you want if xcode is at all sensible.

> master

The wild thing about the term "master" and the people that want to censor it is how English-language centric it is. It really only has the sensitive connotations it has in English. In Italian for example, maestro is teacher.

My fear is that what today is "we should move away from that term" will in a few short years become "we can't hire them because they typed 'git checkout master' in their live coding interview" and at that point it discriminates against those for whom English is their second language.

This happened to a friend of mine with the word "lynch". In English it is a highly racializes term but in his native tongue, Portuguese, the connotation largely revolves around mob violence committed against rapists and adulterers (just go search for the verb "linchar" and you'll find youtube videos of mob violence against people suspected of rape and adultery).

Well he used that term in a discussion on github back when discussing the changes to a popular open source project's code of conduct about 7-8 years ago and a bunch of cancel culture folks jumped on him and it culminated in them trying to get him fired from his current job. He was lucky that it was long enough ago that his boss brushed it off, but in today's environment he's certain he would have lost his job over using a term in his native tongue that is fully divorced from how people feel about the word in English.

Your point really underscored how idiotically narrow minded and self absorbed these inquisition-like crusades against racial offense sometimes are. The people conducting them in the English-speaking western world seem to not even realize that their entire framing of "inclusiveness" is based on an amusingly simplistic and even unconsciously hypocritical presumption of all linguistic connotations being beholden to English definitions of things. Especially amusing to see this coming from people who otherwise fixate to an insane degree on signalling their embrace for non-western, non-"privileged" cultural values.

Another common example related to yours: in countries with latin languages like spanish or Portuguese, the word for both the color black and black people in a completely generic non-racist way is negro. It literally just means black. A Spanish speaker having said it in the wrong context in an english language setting could easily invite criticism born of the silliness I mentioned above.

The example you brought up is an interesting one because in English the work Black is the accepted term but in Portuguese the word for the color itself (preto) is the pejorative if used to describe people. So essentially the exact opposite of in English. The Portuguese pejorative is the accepted term in English and the English pejorative is the accepted term in Portuguese.

Americans sadly are now indiscriminately exporting their particularly toxic understanding of race and race relationships to other parts of the world and damaging the social fabric of these other countries. It's like introducing a new species of plant that ends up being invasive and destructive like kudzu.

We had an extensive and wasteful discussion about this at my last company over the summer. It was absurd. The proponents of replacing every word that could potentially be offensive have this superstitious view of language as having inherent power that continues from generation to generation. They really believe that a word can carry traces of evil with it over time. Naturally there's zero science behind this.

It's a religion without forgiveness or redemption. And the high priests of this religion will never allow the language to sit they will always find new words to change and replace and shame us with.

I remember a couple decades ago, an "enlightened" fellow college student called one of our British collaborators on a project "African American". Because people around that time started thinking calling someone "black" was offensive.

Lots of this is very English and even US-centric. The lack of awareness and what is effectively an attempt to dominate other cultures in the name of inclusiveness is kinda interesting.

How will we refer to a common graduate degree between bachelor and doctorate?

Exactly. In German it’s meister and in Swedish mästare.

It has absolutely nothing to do with slavery.

Sorry if this offends someone but I think a lot of these newly verboten words nonsense stems from poor education and ignorance in the US.

It feels like the left-wing version of the satanic panic

My company has a list of over 80 banned and 'discouraged' words without listing obvious slurs

"wife" is one of the new ones. Not inclusive

Wife? I guess you'll all have to start using "the ball and chain".

The Cockney version is "trouble and strife". Just wait until they find out what a Berkshire hunt is though.

How do you define doublethink?

They probably meant "crimestop".

I understand it's not a very common one and can be kind of confusing. Here's a pretty good definition:

"the acceptance of or mental capacity to accept contrary opinions or beliefs at the same time"

In this case, the conflicting belief that these words are okay in the course you are taking, but that these words are not okay if you are discussing the course material.

They can be not ok and you just deal with it. The presence of conflict and cognitive dissonance isnt doublethink.

Most of Orwell is misunderstood in an aesthetic or superficial way unfortunately.

Moving away from blacklist/whitelist seems reasonable to me.

The etymology of the word has nothing to do with race.[1] There are many uses in the English language where colors are used as descriptors in ways that have nothing to do with race.

Do you think we should ban the terms blackout, blackbody radiation, black holes, black ice, black ops, and black markets? Not everything is about race.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting

Most/all of your examples have to do with the actual color black.

afaik "blacklisting" comes from the black binding of the book that usually contained the blacklist of a merchant, apparently also employers.

How do you think it came about?

> > black market

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/common-words-phrases-racist-o... :

> The symbolism of white as positive and black as negative is pervasive in our culture. Watts-Jones has highlighted many terms with negative meanings that reference blackness. In the English language, she wrote in 2004, color is “related to extortion (blackmail), disrepute (black mark), rejection (blackball), banishment (blacklist), impurity (‘not the driven snow’) and illicitness (black market).”

> > black ops

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101110054644A... :

> Consequently, it becomes apparent that 'Call of Duty: Black Ops' really means - Call to Arms against the Black People

You thought you were joking, weren't you? The latter link might be sarcasm, but at this point, it's actually hard to tell.

Huffpost and yahoo answers as a source...

The point isn't to proof that these words are bad, the point is that people have already called for banning these words. 5-10 years ago you would have had similarly "bad" sources for banning blacklist et al., and yet here we are.

They can be wrong now and 5-10 years ago. Something that stupid getting traction doesn't make it more valid

How? There is no racial connotation—black and white had those associations in European culture long before contact with Africa: https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2009/12/light-and-dark-2....

> In Old English, the adjective could mean “very evil or wicked; iniquitous; foul, hateful,” according to the dictionary. The earliest Oxford citation is from a scientific and theological treatise written by a Benedictine cleric in the late 10th century.

Not only that, but those colors have similar associations all over the world, for example in India and Japan. It has to do with nighttime/darkness having foreboding/negative implications.

> Berne notes that the ideas of light=goodness and dark=badness existed in ancient cultures (including Egyptian and Greek), and can be found in Asia and around the globe.

> Joseph Campbell, writing in the journal Daedalus in 1959, says it was the Persian philosopher Zoroaster (circa 600 BC) who put the seal on the concept of darkness being evil.

Yes, black vs white is a very old concept. Why do you think europeans started referring to people from africa as black and themselves as white, when they are really more like pink and brown?

Ever notice that purple foods tend to be called either red or blue (or sometimes black if they're dark purple)? Like red cabbage, red onions, red grapes, blue potatoes[1]. Or for that matter how white grapes are green and black walnuts are brown? How black eyes are usually purple?

English just seems to have a strong preference towards approximating everything with the most basic colors.

Europeans also called native Americans red and Asians yellow, and it probably wasn't because they associated those colors with evil.

All people are shades of brown. White people can be pinkish, but are usually light brown or reddish light brown. When you look at this white man's [2] skin color next to the light brown wood he's working with, he's clearly a darker brown than the wood. But I imagine Europeans didn't want to label races as light brown, medium brown and dark brown.

[1] https://www.almanac.com/sites/default/files/image_nodes/all_... [2] https://c.stocksy.com/a/0m5500/z9/1213836.jpg

I wonder why we call people with brown skin, black?

This is interesting. I plugged them into Google ngram viewer. Whitelist was almost unused until 2000. Blacklist came into use right after the Reconstruction era (may or may not mean anything), but it has two peaks in use: WWI and WWII. I was expecting McCarthyism, but it wasn't as popular as during major wars.

Blacklists's first known usage in English comes from England in the 1600's, specifically referring to a list of people who were involved in the execution of Charles I. Its origin literally has nothing to do with race.

why? the terms do not have racial histories to them.

entire paper on the subject here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6148600/

I personally like using “blocklist” instead of “blacklist” but that paper is pretty terrible. It seems more like an opinion piece with a bunch of references to give it authority.

Here’s a critical piece of the “evidence” presented:

“In this context, it is worth examining the origins of the term “blacklist” from the Douglas Harper Etymology Dictionary, which states that its origin and history is:

n.

also black-list, black list, “list of persons who have incurred suspicion,” 1610s, from black (adj.), here indicative of disgrace, censure, punishment (attested from 1590s, in black book) + list (n.). Specifically of employers’ list of workers considered troublesome (usually for union activity) is from 1888. As a verb, from 1718. Related: Blacklisted; blacklisting. [32]

It is notable that the first recorded use of the term occurs at the time of mass enslavement and forced deportation of Africans to work in European-held colonies in the Americas.”

Seriously? We clearly need to rethink the whole academic publishing process.

This paper just repeatedly says these are racist words. There is nothing historically they write about that indicates this is true.

Agreed, I don't see how using 'blocklist' is too much to ask, it means exactly what it says

When all you've got is a hammer and sickle, every problem looks like systemic oppression.

How about "blocklist" and "allowlist"?

I think it's the least clever idea since Person Potato Head.

Excuse me but "person" contains "son" in it which is indicative of gendered childhood, and heteronormative reproduction.

This is highly problematic for children and adults who identify as children who may be struggling with their gender identity; as well as those who chose to reproduce through non-sexual or non-heterosexual mechanisms.

Please refer to them as per-offspring potato heads instead.

Coming up next: post per-offspring Pat and his neither Black nor White cat, Jess who may or may not marry a dog.

What's a terminology to replace 'master' in the case of a 'master list'. I've used 'primary' and 'main', but they both imply the existence of a secondary or other acceptable replacement, which is rarely the case. "Single source of truth" is too cumbersome and often the incorrect context. 'Prime' looks like the best candidate going by synonyms. 'Authoritative' has too many syllables, although gets the point across.

Blacklist and whitelist, when looking at the etymology these terms are obviously problematic, and I happily use block/ban list and allow list. Easy. Even "Green list" and "Red list" would work fine, traffic lights won't mind.

Sanity check, never thought about that one. "Sense check" may have similar connotations, but the word sense, itself, has multiple meanings, so that's got a backdoor. Congruity check? I don't want to have to explain the word every time I ask for someone to "congruity check" a set of data.

> Blacklist and whitelist, when looking at the etymology these terms are obviously problematic

Am I missing something? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting#Origins_of_the_te...

Master list implies secondary lists too.

Plausibility check is a good replacement for sanity check. Or something like quick check to communicate it isn't extensive.

“Single source of truth“

Isn’t that a little Bigoted?

Sorry - should have put a /s - that was meant to be a joke.

s/will/has already/, as anybody who's worked at a FAANG in the past 5 years can attest.

Not just tech. My Fortune 500 company is actively sending out emails on critical race theory.

Critical race theory is nothing but racism and extremism, disguised as an academic discipline.

If somebody sent me racist emails at work I would file a complaint.

This is why you should support New Hampshire's bill HB 544, currently working its way through the NH legislature, and support similar bills that are nascent in other states (off the top of my head: Oklahoma, Iowa, West Virginia, maybe some others I've missed) and, if you're not in those states, contact your elected representatives and push for a similar bill.

The only way this poison is going to be defeated is through the law. In fact, the journalist Chris Rufo argues that much of what's pushed by the CRT activists is likely already illegal under the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act. This needs to be affirmed in the courts.

The tragedy is who you would complain to? HR?

Honestly it’s becoming unbearable.

As someone who grew up in the 90's. I do feel a bit "older" and more conservative even though I never considered myself that way. It makes me take a step back and realize that our belief systems tend to stagnate and I can only imagine how radical my college or high school beliefs may have seemed to older folk.

Now imagine someone who grew up in the 70s or 60s. They must feel like complete strangers in this new world.

One of many fun things is that most of the politically correct terms at the time ("retarded", "transvestite", "mentally ill" etc) have now become unspeakably offensive.

> One of many fun things is that most of the politically correct terms at the time ("retarded", "transvestite", "mentally ill" etc) have now become unspeakably offensive.

The euphemism treadmill strikes again.

I'd not heard that "mentally ill" crossed into that territory. What term do they say should be used instead? I'm guessing "neurodiverse."

"a person who has experienced mental health issues".

https://www.time-to-change.org.uk/media-centre/responsible-r...

"Neurodiverse" is code du jour for autism, and HR will be contacting you shortly for the offensive ableism of labeling neurodiversity as mental illness, instead of celebrating it.

You're acting like social attitudes have only progressed in one direction in that time.

The 70s or 60s kid might be raised in a context of peace and love, anti-war sentiment, then be just as shocked to see Ronald Reagan, low taxes, spending cuts for social programs, the religious right, wars of choice, higher wealth disparity, outsourcing in manufacturing and other industries, privatization, young fascists going on tiki marches in favor of the confederacy, on and on ...

To say nothing of how badly we've managed to wreck the environment in those 50-60 years.

Those that were involved in birthing the current brands of radicalism grew up in the 70s and 60s. They are merely reaping the consequences of those beliefs.

They don't call it "the long march through the institutions" for nothin'.