I can understand trying to remove some stigmatisations, like blacklist for bad and whitelist for good, even though they are hard as they are very commonly used. But maybe that is part of the problem, that our western culture has the colour encoding of white == good and black == bad.

Even in an ideal world, where people don't notice the skin color anymore, I can see how a person with a black skin might feel hurt about that encoding in general, so maybe it is good moving step by step away from that, despite that it causes inconvenience.

I find it especially hard to think of good/bad or even race when using the term blacklist or whitelist tho.

There is some good reason to change black-/whitelists naming, but supposed racism is not one of them, because it is only due to some people feeling offended by a technical term. If you change words because some might feel offended, it will never stop. In the end you still have words to denote some characteristic and it will be taken as offensive if it is used at all (or by people of the "wrong" characteristic).

Well, since we are evolving our culture our changing of words hopefully never stops. Languge is an ongoing process and much of our language was shaped in a patriarchal, racist and sexist environment, that existed for centuries if not millenias.

Now I might say, we advanced from that, so there are necessary language changes happening.

That much energy is wasted in that regard, I very much agree. And I'd like some sanity back in the debate.

I am also not sure about the black/white thing.

(ah btw. some racist indeed favor the blond over black haired people, which gave ways to a antinazi joke:

The Arier: Blond like Hitler, thin like Göring and tall like Himmler.)

But I am "white", so I am not sure if I can judge about about a black skinned persons feelings about the matter or just ignore them.

But that the very color linked to race scheme is stupid in the first place and that this should be the thing fighting against, I would agree.

There was a south park episode about that, Cartman hit the black kid (just out of being an asshole with anger problems). And the school was about to punish him as usual, but no, because he was black it was a hate crime and the higher institutions got involved, with big fuss and lots of saying black.

So I think Stan in the end said: if you treat people different because of their skin color, it means they are different. So it reinforces the race thinking.

So I do agree: when I see a blacklist, I never would associate that with a person. I just try to be a bit sensitive of people who do. Which yes, it is hard to draw the line.

In that ideal world, that person would be as likely to feel hurt as a person with black hair... that is, if you can even find a person with truly black skin.

Haha, that's good one, I love it! :-)

(Although 'human' comes from Latin and has nothing to do with Germanic 'man', but these details are never part of such a discussion, so let's ignore them.)

When do people realise that 'homo sapiens' is sexist (and maybe offensive to LGBT* people!!)? It must be renamed to 'persona sapiens'!

> guys, you guys: When referring to a group of people use non-gendered language, such as everyone or folks.

Isn't the plural form "guys" already explicitly inclusive?

If I had to try to nail down when it is and isn't inclusive, I would say that when it is used in the second-person, where a speaker is directly addressing a group, it is the most likely to be gender-neutral: "Do you guys like this idea? Can I get you guys anything?"

When it is used in a first- or third-person perspective, it's less likely to be used in a gender-neutral way. "I know some guys who work there" tends to be used only if you're talking about men. If you're talking about women only or a mixed group, it's more common to say, "I know some women who work there" or "I know some people who work there."

People assuming how they use language, is right, assumes that there is one language, eg, one english, not many.

Very 'centre of the universe' thinking.

I grew up in Toronto, Canada where "guys" was widely used as a gender-neutral term in most contexts (admittedly there are some phrases where a gender is heavily implied). However when I was working at a tech company in Dublin, Ireland I noticed that if I addressed a room with "guys" women in the room would often feel excluded. This is not unreasonable given the different dialects and the minority of women in this setting. So sure, we could say that she is wrong for feeling excluded but when many minorities already feel excluded it seems wrong to use language that reaffirms that nagging feeling constantly whispering to them from the back of their mind.

And avoiding the term "guys" is a simple case even though "Y'all" and "folks" sound really odd to me, I agree that there is a huge spectrum here and the line of what is reasonable and what isn't is incredibly fuzzy.

In some cases, I found it the opposite. I've discussed this with a woman or two, as I was curious, and didn't want to offend. And they felt it includes them. Nothing is changed because they are there, they're just "one of the guys". Not a woman, or a man. Just another person in the group.

You cite Dublin, and that's valid. And yet, that was me point. Here was have a world spanning company, Google, which should be as "metropolitan' as they come, blathering on about setting world-wide language policy, from the viewpoint of a small little US state.

Seems very, very colloquial to me.

If you're going to work in a world-spanning company, thinking your culture, in your little, tiny corner of the world, is "right" all the time is absurd.

Yes, there are are colloquial uses where it is gender neutral, but those are not universal internationally.

This seems like a completely made up problem.

> This seems like a completely made up problem.

Only because it doesn't impact you. Consider developing more empathy. Surely you know some folks who gave challenges in their lives that others callously dismiss as not a big deal.

> Surely you know some folks who gave challenges in their lives that others callously dismiss as not a big deal.

Sure do. And they recognised that those problems were their own that they needed to overcome. Not insist that everyone else change to accommodate them.

So for some people guys has a touch of the ladies not being explicitly asked for feedback to questions like "hi guys, where should we go today". Now this is not universal but language rarely is and context matters a whole lot.

Well yes, which undermines your example. When I see women use the term 'hey guys', they are normally addressing a mixed group, with no precedence implied or inferred. In a 1-on-1 conversation, I would find it weird asking someone their dating history if I didn't know what their sexual orientation was. Different context, different connotations.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/master