Plug/socket terminology is not necessarily the same as male/female terminology. The socket can be male, if it is the one with the metal pins. The power connector on the back of a PC is a good example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_of_connectors_and_faste...

Of course, people aren't necessarily using the terminology completely correctly as it is.

And then there's the connectors on fancy RF equipment that can assume either role!

This is totally off-topic, I'm just startled (I don't know why, esp. knowing you worked at RIM) to see your username here! I recently discovered your channel & site (via Marius Hornberger's) and have had hours of entertainment 'binge-watching' through the entire back catalogue (nearly finished, sadly) - very many thanks.

To anyone else - wholeheartedly recommend woodgears.ca & https://www.youtube.com/c/Matthiaswandel/videos. The former's been discussed a few times too: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... (But again, because it's of general HN-type engineering-y interest - not all 'just' woodworking - not because it has any relevance to this particular submission.)

I believe the title of this Wikipedia article is wrong. When we started replacing the word "sex" with "gender" a few years ago, we were careful to differentiate both uses. But a few years later some people started to feel like "gender" is the new politically-correct word for "sex". It is not: these two have very distinct uses, and using "gender" for connectors is ridiculous because - as far as we can tell - they have no social identity (yet!).

I was informally taught that a plug goes into a socket. Cables and adapters commonly have the same connector on each end, making the plug/socket terminology even less descriptive of the connecting formats.

Inny and Outy?

Sex isn't ewwww. It's a natural and everyday thing. I could ask the same question: What is wrong with you?

That's a good point. As an exercise for the reader, let's try to write an outrage article from the opposing viewpoint:

One of the shining examples of body shaming and societal opression of sexual expression is the recent push of changing the naming of audio plugs as "male" and "female", calling this naming "gross" and "problematic", as if genitalia was something to be ashamed of instead of treating it as a natural an everyday thing.

OK I'm not very good at this, I'm sure someone from the Guardian could do a much better job.

Let's be honest. Sex is plenty ewww for US Americans that mostly are heading these language changes. It also feels like catholicism 2.0.

I believe that question is also offensive to someone, somewhere, hence not allowed.

Puritanism is back, baby!

It's not though, it's generally reserved for the bedroom and private spaces.

Performing it is. Talking about it is not. At least not when I was a kid, unless you were from some really socially conservative family.

Oh please do. With something like an audio cable at least there's one end that is purely sticking out and one end that is purely sticking in. But with a lot of other cables there's a mix of inny bits and outy bits and it took me a long time to work out which bit I'm supposed to pay attention to to make the analogy work (the answer is to pay attention to any visible bits that carry a single/power. If this is obvious to you I suspect it was just because of how someone explained it to you, but if you're just brillianter than me then great!).

> But with a lot of other cables there's a mix of inny bits and outy bits

If there's a mixture, is plug & socket any clearer?

Such proposals usually start with "self-evident" assertion of harm incorrect terminology causes, but is it actually measurable? Did anyone make research while isolating influence of such things? Sociology is such a shitshow

> but is it actually measurable?

Of course not. Although this isn't sociology and shouldn't be blamed on the field. Yes, they have these guys, but it is a minority. It is just a silly group of industry partners.

If this terminology actually causes harm we should see trans people and groups propose such a change, not an industry group looking for a PR opportunity.

You're saying it should be reactionary, that someone should get angry first. You're also making assumptions about the people pushing for this. Why not pre-empt it and save everyone a lot of headaches? You don't need to be a victim or to be offended to realize a problem and work on a fix. I mean I'm not affected or offended by your comment, yet here I am.

I do make assumptions about people pushing this at this point. I don't realize the problem and nobody can explain it. I see this as PR and people falling for it that wait for empty promises about something.

You actually do, in this case. If using the terms "male" and "female" causes harm, the harm it causes is psychological. You can't really realize it from the outside. There is nothing to pre-empt here: These terms are already used to either they already cause harm or they won't start doing so. Which means there is no reason to effectively guess if they cause harm since you can actually ask someone who you think may be harmed. Solving a problem that doesn't actually exist is just a waste of time and resources. Moreover, it gives people the impression that "wokeness" in general is just pointless virtue signalling.

I've had individuals in affected groups ask me why I was using particular words as far as 30 years back. (in that case, it was IDE).

It's not really my place to be asserting that it's not offensive or causing harm, when it costs very little to be less offensive and more precise.

You're not calculating cost correctly. Think of it from an information theoretic point of view. You exist in a network that has already converged to a dominant representation. It's essentially a nigh universally understood application of those terms in a technical context. Even more than an API, it could be considered a part of socio-technical ABI or calling convention.

Imagine if you will a world in which every individual starts changing what they call things on a whim every day. You run into a Tower of Babel problem, and one that at best, stabilizes to a dynamic equilibrium i.e., the problem never stops, it just changes from thing to thing. Symbol changes have cost. That cost quickly amplifies in terms of required reconciliation and update of protocol across the entire human network. That means across languages, cultures, education systems, etc.

What you'll find, is this seriously grates against a bunch of people way more interested in getting work done and being understood without being on receiving end of This Week's Polemic at the same time.

This may sound callous or cold, but there is a reason society does not wholesale rewrite foundational communication structures/cultures/techné/art/etc... on a whim, and when it does happen, it's not just because a small group gets a marginal bump, but the change warrants such a bump in overall benefit or actualizable horizons of possibility, that it becomes worth the chaos of adapting to the change and shepherding it along.

Every individual may think they only have to pay or exact a one time cost but that quickly compounds.Think of all the times you end up saying "You know what I mean?" and the recipient goes on to demonstrate they do. This is one of those cases where one can only really justify change having a trivial cost in the presence of ascribing a value modifier of 0 or less to tradition, instead of actually accounting for all the instances of questions that don't need to be asked, because there is an instinctual, endemic response. While one or another person looking at themselves in isolation may see the cost as trivial to enact in their local sphere of influence, it exacts a non trivial cost in the overall context of human to human communication over time.

Note, I'm not saying no one should try to change these types of things. To do so, or try to is the essence of politics; I'm merely pointing out that the only way you see no cost is if you did count a whole lot of other implicit dependencies elsewhere as not significant.

You do you, but reality has a way of making it hurt when people do that.

That's what I wrote. But the Professional Audio Manufacturers Alliance does not represent an affected group.

absolutely agree. this feels like someone wants to do "something" but does actually nothing. this won't help or stop the abuse/hate/discrimination against women or trans (please dont hate me if i let someone out :()

purely a PR move.

Well such groups are praising the change, so it seems they support it. From the linked article

> “Shoutout to PAMA for introducing neutral language for the audio industry,” said Karrie Keyes, Executive Director of the women-in-audio advocacy group SoundGirls.org, as well as monitor engineer for Pearl Jam/Eddie Vedder. “This is a tremendous undertaking and is important to continue working toward meaningful changes in our industry.”

Then again, people might not really like women advocacy groups if they find out they pushed such changes.

That's a feminist group, not a trans group, but point taken. Though that seems to be more of a group of female prudes. Unless female connectors/plugs are considered somehow inferior to male ones in the industry?

They have been, for decades. The response has always been "to succeed this kind of change needs to come from within the industry".

I believe you -- and I don't actually like the gendered terms myself -- but do you have a source for that?

How could you isolate such an effect? I'm sure the problem is linked to society as a whole -- the words only make sense because people relate them to genetalia.

People have done research by asking people what they think about such gendered terms, and people in the less represented gender (in whichever situation you are talking about) tend to dislike them.

Maybe less represented gender likes this terminology less because they understand it less(because they are less represented)

I'm just saying waving away the need for proving points before taking acion is doing more harm than good

Which is the less represented gender here?

I'm guessing women are under-represented in the Professional Audio Manufacturers Alliance. I will admit I don't have evidence of that.

Does that actually matter?

Nope, it's classic outrage culture and bullying tactic.

Who is outraged and who is bullying in this case? It looks like the industry is being proactive and is pre-empting outrage. Using gendered terminology is unnecessary anyway, to the point where it becomes childish (giggle, boy plug goes into girl socket and you get sparks)

Male/female terminology cuts through noise and using male/female for plugs translates to probably every language immediately if you are trying to convey what plugs into what.

I can see a possibility that it had real utility in communicating concepts across completely, different languages, where using the words socket and plug might have caused confusion and more time spent in translation.

Agreed - it’s intuitive to humans, the primary users of tech

Plug and socket: less intuitive

Using gendered terminology is probably not harmful at all. Why should it be? This terminology was understood in almost all colleagues in nearly any languages. Most were men, yes, but that isn't the reason why women are underrepresentated.

You can call plugs "famale" too:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32861597805.html

technically gender neutral... although I find the double head a bit indecent...

I grew up with _fiş_ and _priz_. Presumably, they are words that were borrowed in to Turkish from French. To this day, I cannot remember which is which and I do not know the original French spellings. According to Google translate, _fiş_ is "prise de courant" so what the heck is _priz_ then?

Anyway, the point is, "male" and "female" made immediate sense. "plug" and "socket" don't seem to be exact analogues. When I think of a socket, I think more of things that are more permanent things like wall sockets or sockets on actual computers etc. Is there any reason to assume that all such things will always be receptacles? When I look at this picture[1], I see a set of "female" sockets next to a "male" socket using the disfavored terminology. As English is my second language, I do not know whether I should refer to the one that is "male" as a plug.

Another aversion I have to the general tendency to changing language by decree is the fact that I experienced the linguistic impoverishment visited upon the Turkish language as a result of the 20th century effort to remove words of Arabic and Farsi origin and somehow arrive at a "pure" language. Such efforts rarely lead to where their designers want them to go.

[1]: https://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2007/08/inlet...

> To this day, I cannot remember which is which and I do not know the original French spellings. According to Google translate, _fiş_ is "prise de courant" so what the heck is _priz_ then?

_priz_ is "prise" (socket). _fiş_ is "fiche" (plug). The thing is that both can be either male or female.

> When I think of a socket, I think more of things that are more permanent things like wall sockets or sockets on actual computers

That's definitely the case. A "prise" is a wall socket and a "fiche" is on a wire. I believe it's the actual definition of the terms.

Oh dear. The distinction between sex and gender again.

Back in the days of RS232, I owned a cable known as a "gender-bender". This was long before the days of Boy George. It was 8" long, and had a female DB-25 connector on each end. These things were also known as "eight-inch couplers", a term into which you could also read sexual connotations.

As an ESL person "plug and socket" only seems marginally less sexually-connotated than "male and female bits".

Is plug and socket any better? Aren’t you assigning binary signal processing roles to a spectrum? What if they want to identify simply as connectors?

I think the underlying reaons is that the association is harmful alone, especially if the association contains somthing about sex. I think that is a fundamental misunderstanding.

I don't like people that advocate for language regulation, because they cannot even justify their positions, they just try to force it on others and wonder about the negative feedback.

"I doesn't cost much" is often an argument, but it remains silly from start.

Why is male and female terminology bad here? Are we disputing that men have penises and women have vaginas? That doesn’t imply that you can’t have a sex change. Do trans people not generally convert their genitalia to match the destination sex?

Just because something is true doesn't make it something we are allowed to acknowledge as being so.

I think the argument is, to understand this terminology, you have to reduce people to their sexual organs. This isn't a trans-related issue.

No, they don't. A few do, but the operation is expensive, painful, and not always satisfactory. Many will take hormones and some will have non-genital surgeries, but full gender confirmation surgery is for a minority.

A great many, perhaps a majority, don't do anything to their bodies at all. They change their clothes, their pronouns, their hair, and their lifestyles, but have no surgery or medicines. They live in society as their gender, and anything that's seen only by the people they're intimate with are a subject for discussion between them.

The result is that yes, there are a fair number of men with vaginas and women with penises. Which doesn't matter to you unless you're either their doctor or their lover, but it's important to recognize that it is in fact the case.

> So I guess you didn't hear what has happened at a Wi Spa [0] recently?

A woman went to the women's changing room and some bigots freaked out?

Perhaps some of those so-called "bigots" are young girls who really shouldn't have and don't want a penis exposed to them? Clearly women and girls are the ones who should be deciding who they share a changing room with (generally not a person with male genitals) .

It's a woman's changing room, not a whoever-you-like-seeing changing room. There is no reason (other than some sort of puritanism) to get freaked out about girls seeing penises. In this context, it's just a body part.

> There is no reason (other than some sort of puritanism) to get freaked out about girls seeing penises.

This is totally asinine. There are a many reasons why... With just a little thought I'm sure you can think of at least one.

If there was one, you'd have already told me what it is.

The idea that only uncivilized societies allow for public nudity is an ignorant and self-perpetuating colonialist stereotype. Not wanting eg your wife to see a penis, especially a feminine woman's penis, is laughably insecure at best, and bigoted and hateful at worst. Similarly, not wanting your assumed daughter to see a penis is harmful to her (or potentially his) emotional growth, and should be considered borderline child abuse.

You are putting many words into my mouth - for starters I didn't mention anything about uncivilized societies. Second, you don't get to decide what a women does and doesn't want to see - especially if you're a man. As it turns out many women and girls would be uncomfortable around male genitalia when in a changing room for women. I suppose you would be OK sending a girl "d*k pics"? What would your excuse be? "Don't be so insecure!!!"

Yes, and many would be uncomfortable around black women. Or lesbians. Too bad for them, those are women too.

Sending unsolicited dick picks is sexual harassment. A woman changing in the women's changing room isn't.

fully valid women who were born with penises are 1000x underrepresented in your completely arbitrary 'women' group, therefore should get 1000x weighting to their opinion

Thew fact alone that sex is being put away as "ewwwww" shows where the real problem lies. Now master and slave was already somewhat ridiculous discussion. This discussion is really a flag waver, as there is no negative connotation with different sexes. Usually written by self acclaimed experts.

I found some other interesting ones in the linked Google website:

https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation

They have to give the inclusivity crowd some kind of work, but I think such rules are extremely counterproductive.

Company likes speech codes and NDAs, but this is just idiotic.

Are the scare quotes necessary? In this case, they are somewhat misleading, as it's not the industry group (Professional Audio Manufacturers Alliance) that called the changes obvious, but rather this particular article.

Can confirm using "plug" for both male and female ends interchangeably

The plug is part of the cable, the socket is part of the device. The geometry of the connector itself is irrelevant.

How would one differentiate between the type of cable end that goes into this outlet?

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Leviton-15-Amp-125-Volt-Locking-...

Use a second word to identify it. A "Foo plug" or if it's just the reverse of what you normally have, an "inverted plug."

Adding an avenue for confusion when you can tell anyone in any language that you need a wire with a female end for a male outlet seems like a less than ideal use of resources.

Sounds like you're conflating connector types with which side goes on the cable. Your ontology only works for simple connectors where the gender metaphor is trivial. But it's still a metaphor, and a poor and crude one at that. You could say "pinned socket" and "holed plug" and be simpler and more direct.

But sure, keep with the 6th grade penis joke instead.

What is an example where the ontology does not work? It seems like a pretty accurate metaphor for all the everyday electrical/plumbing use cases I have come across. What makes it “poor and crude”?

And viewing it as a 6th grade penis joke is more of a 6th grade penis joke mentality than just using male and female. We use allusion all the time to use words to mean different things in different contexts all the time.

And this will cause issues when you have cable-into-cable. Then you'll have a plug into a plug, with no apparent difference.

Which is clearly a more useable syntax

how?

male and female clearly described which goes where. if you interchange "plug" , I won't know which cable extender or plug or cable will I buy.

I was being sarcastic

Well said:

"To put it more simply – neutral language is always better for technical terminology, because it’s clearer, more accessible to more people, and includes the people who provide the talent and skills that make industries and technologies work. End of story."

Next up: AI cabling suggested to be sold in multi-packs only, so that you have spares if the first identifies differently to your requirement.

Note that we already have 'couplers' that allow 'mating' female-female or male-male cable ends, so I think any argument that it's homophobic language or whatever is on thin ground. Really the only valid (if I can call it that) argument against it is the author's 'eewwww', but.. really?