>Sometimes avoiding those connotations are exceptionally hard, verging on impossible.

Is it? Two years ago if someone told me they think of certain races every time they hear about whitelists or black holes I'd find them a bit silly.

To be honest, I still find people a bit silly that think of certain races when reading those terms.

> Sometimes avoiding those connotations are exceptionally hard

That is 100% an anglo-saxon world problem since most European languages either differentiate between words for skin color and color name, or using the color name to describe skin color isn't considered racist at all.

I would stretch it even to mark it as an US-only problem.

Instead, European languages have a tendency to gender everything. I imagine that’s an untapped “problem” in some folks’ eyes that will boil over sooner or later.

I was recently in France and was told by a local this was actually an issue with the covid outbreak. There is a department that decides on the gender of new words and they determined covid (or some variant on that) to be feminine.

Presumably, the folk at the Académie Française¹.

Every couple of years they release a statement that causes a flurry of changes in the documentation of a few projects I've worked on. Always in really curious ways too, exchanging words that are common to French people in our industry with words uncommon to everyone.

I kind of appreciate the quirkiness of the whole thing.

¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Académie_Française

> There is a department that decides on the gender of new words

TIL. Fascinating.

> covid (or some variant on that) to be feminine.

And here I was hoping that I was being too pessamistic.

Gramatical gender has very little to do with the words it describes. For example, in a particularly confusing twist: féminisme (feminism) is a masculine noun, wheras masculinité (masculinity) is feminine.

It's mostly due to the pronunciation and spelling of the word ending. Although in this case, the Académie Française decided feminine because COVID is an acronym, and the last word of that acronym is disease, and disease is a feminine word (la Maladie) because of how it is spelled.

The issue with Covid is that we all started to say LE covid for a few months until June/July or so, maybe because we say LE coronavirus, and then they come and tell us we must say LA Covid.

It's not that we gender everything, I am Italian and my language does not have the neutral pronoun. Everything is either masculine or feminine.

Single find & replace is exactly what this document tells you not to do, since that's how you get dumb^W suboptimal results like "denylisted" instead of sane^W more clear options like "denied".