"Show, don't tell" is as good advice for PR as it is for storytelling in my opinion. I don't want you to tell me how great you are at tackling the issues of the day with token changes like this, I want you to show me by actually doing things that demonstrate you believe in the stuff that's coming out of your mouth rather than just trying to appear like a "good person". Changing "master" to "main" or "primary" is as authentic as Facebook or Google saying they care about privacy.
This kind of developer-driven change does not wind me up, because developers working on products should be able to reflect on how those products are part of society and if they choose to make changes in their branding, presentation, or diction, they should be able to do so. Mozilla has a pretty rich tradition of employee activism, as we all observed after the Eich debacle, and I suspect employees want their work to make them feel good in terms of alignment with their bedrock principles. This is true even if individual customers oppose their politics, especially since the vast majority of users will never notice this or read a changelog. Symbolic gestures are part of a program of practically increasing social justice. They do not replace more concrete measures, they are additive in addition to them: Mozilla and Thunderbird should still pursue employment equity, charitable works, and other mission-related goals while doing this.
Although minor, the expression is authentic, and it is normal for symbolic gestures to precede other measures because it's normal to tackle problems through a combination of taking the most important actions and the easiest (even if minor) actions, the same way turning up the freezer a few degrees might not be the most important thing you can do to reduce your footprint but it is something you can do before you finish reading this post.
"Tell" is good advice for changelogs, because the literal purpose of a changelog is to tell the changes that were made. If I'm dumb enough to waste my time reading a changelog (and I obviously am), I do want you to tell me what you actually changed, even if the change is a minor change to diction or a typo fix. Collapsing changelog entries into "changed some in-program text" obfuscates the actual change and does little to demonstrate the actual changes made.
Being very worried about a change from "master" to "main" is as authentic as opponents of social justice quoting MLK to project an image of caring about social justice.
if it makes you feel good to play with words I am not sure if thats a good energy expenditure for your activism. it feels like a cheap way to value signal instead of doing something actually meaningful.
Like, I suspect some of the employees involved in this change also volunteer with organizations, they also donate money to organizations, they also make other changes in their personal life, right? Maybe not all of them. Maybe some of them wake up and think "Social justice is really important to me so I'm going to do an empty virtue signal and then nothing else, wow I'm great". Even if that were true it's not super obvious what the concern is here -- okay, so maybe someone involved in this change could be a better person and could be using their energy more effectively? And? Surely there's a better use of my energy and yours than replying to a patchnotes post on hacker news to get mad about a one word change in a changelog of an email client, and yet here we are.
About half of my post was talking about how symbolic things, while not a substitute for concrete things, are part of making changes, and how often times tackling problems with a combination of the most urgent issues and the easiest to fix issues is normal, so it's weird that the reply would be "Symbolic things just substitute for concrete things and this issue is easy, not urgent". Like, yes, I've already considered your perspective here, that's why I replied to begin with?
To be honest I'm not sure where I stand on prescriptivism as a concept. If there's a genuine organic demand (as opposed to corporate PR people playing tokenism) for it in the context of tackling racism then fair enough I can get behind that, but I don't really like the idea of language itself being used as a political cudgel to beat your opponents with. The word Orwellian is relentlessly misused these days but I think if we are going to forcefully change language it needs to be something done with great consideration and democratic oversight to avoid this tool being wielded abusively. For example, I'd love to abolish all Americanisms from British English which is exactly why I'd be grossly unfit for such a language-defining duty!
So why cling to a word that has so much cultural baggage when it doesn't even work that well in Thunderbird?
> So why cling to a word that has so much cultural baggage
> when it doesn't even work that well in Thunderbird?
Clinging? We're all just talking here and we don't have any authority over this software. Are we allowed to have differing opinions about what already took place? I think so.
Personally, my opinion is that I laugh at these people for their empty virtue signaling that really doesn't help understanding here in this case. We don't have to be clinging in order to discuss how idiotic we think things are.
The idea that we're going to use words but ignore context and intent is self-defeating. It weakens the powers of human communication. It's as if to say: "Words speak louder than action."
That's sounds like a quote for 1984.
Which is also just a lot of empty words that make you feel good about the fundamental change you're helping sweep over the world.
Except when they don't.
That's the point.
This change is completely meaningless in practical terms, which means the only value derived is in the heads of those wanting to see the change.
This is why we view it cynically.
Someone commenting cynically on the action does not 'prove' that those words have some kind of influence.
.. for you. I hope nobody ever insults you.
> How they are used literally changes the discourse.
No. People come up with ideas and thoughts, and wanting to express themselves, they seek out looking for words. Peoples ideas and thoughts make up how words are meant.
Why instead of changing tech wording affecting every dev worldwide who does not care about american pseudo social justice, just do not call dark er skin „black“ and brighter skin „white“?
I mean still more people are afraid in the absence of light, hence the dark, than otherwise. And „white“ is often associated with clean, pure. There are psychological effects we can‘t just ignore.
Better just stop associating this pink skin with „white“ and darker skin with „brown“ or „black“.
I mean I still have to see a „white“ person and a „black“ person in real life.
For god‘s sake. Stop finding problems where there are none. Corporate trolling has reached the next level.
Other connotations of the word blacklist include the blacklisting of labor activists and of accused communists during our multiple bouts of anti communist hysteria. The word is charged with ugly meanings and there’s no reason to throw it around casually in a software project.
Somehow we have no issues with master/slave. Most people (except failed students and former party members) know communism was a really really shitty system. And most of the current racial issues are imported from america, during the democrats-vs-trump "battles", and are so americanized, that people forget minorities here (gypsies,...), and use BLM for maybe 10 black people that live here.
There are living people in USA who were around for the segregation.
Are there any documented cases of the word "master" offending anybody?
It is not only about colour but about racial identity.
This article describe this case:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/25/race-east-ja...
Using 'light' for 'good' which mostly derives from daylight, the sun, daytime etc. and darkness for 'bad' etc. might be the most ancient human metaphor, probably dating back to the time we could tell stories. Our first religion, in Egypt, the Sun was God and the God of the 'Dark Underworld' was the bad guy.
Moreover, it doesn't really have connotation with respect to skin colour.
The important, 'hard' part to social activism is context and nuance and also to understand that not all actions which may have some threadbare logic make sense or actually help.
However, I'm also somewhat annoyed by these kinds of changes, mostly because I would never have associated the "black" in blacklist with the skin colour until someone started pointing it out as an issue. While some terminology might be actually problematic, from my point of view there was never any problem with the word blacklist until someone started pointing it out. Now there is.
Once you make enough noise about an association like that, the association will certainly be there for more and more people even if it weren't there before. The problem kind of creates itself.
I'm fairly sure many Americans are understandably rather sensitive and sore about skin colour and racial justice right now. I'm not from the US, so depending on where you're from, this might make a difference in perspectives.
I'm also white and of the ethnic majority in my country, so I certainly don't see all the issues that minorities, immigrants or other ethnic groups might face. If it turned out that the word "blacklist" (to give an example) had been seen as an actual issue all along by a significant proportion of black people in my cultural environment or in most of the world, I wouldn't oppose the change. But if it hadn't been previously associated negatively that way, then creating that association and making a fuss about it has actually created a problem (or at least made one much bigger), not solved one.
While changing a term might not be that big of a thing practically, having to react to something you think shouldn't be an issue in the first place can be annoying out of principle. A social dynamic where you need to go along just because someone else sees a potential problem can also be annoying. My guess would be that the majority of people who are annoyed by these kind of changes are annoyed because of something along those lines.
Once you push something that sparks that kind of a reaction in people hard enough, you get people annoyed, and if you then push more, you get them more annoyed.
As for changing the culture, I'd rather like to see people getting much less neurotic about ethnicity and race rather than more so. I facepalmed hard when I read that, according to some people, the "ok" sign had become problematic because some far-right people had started using it, and that it should be avoided. I think that was an absurd stance; if you stop using an otherwise innocuous sign because someone else started using it for a bad purpose, you end up emphasize that new, bad association. (In that case you'd also kind of let the far-right people win, which makes it even more absurd, but that's not directly relevant here.)
The world is full of associations you can make, including ones with colour that matches someone's skin or religious symbol or any number of things. I've noticed that people are more prone to seeing connections, both in terms of reacting to actual ones as well as making less significant or spurious ones, when they feel more sensitive about related issues. It's no wonder if many (especially) Americans are currently trying to spot even the slightest racial issues and want to change the culture to get rid of them.
I'm just not sure I agree with that approach, or with the idea that it's "justice" or the only way to go. Rather than seeing a cultural change where we're so sensitive to racial issues that we try to see every potential negative connotation imaginable and get rid of them, I'm much prefer to see change towards a world where people don't feel the need to see all of those.
I really don't understand the endgame but I feel like a small group of people who would make wonderful evangelicals have grown up into the secular role of "solvers" of "racial issues".
I'm also not sure "Master password", "Primary password" or "Main password" are particularly intuitive. Probably better to name the resource like "Thunderbird account database password". Or just prompt to "Unlock password database".
Do you see the long list of substantive work done, in this underfunded open source project?
And beyond that, maybe it is because I am not a native speaker, but isn’t “primary” less clear than “master” in this context? `Master` suggest control/mastery over something, but `primary` rather focuses on importance/order of things, at least in my head.
I agree with your assessment. “primary” — to me — implies one of many equally-important passwords. “master” implies a password that protects/overrides/controls all other passwords, which is what Thunderbird’s master password actually is.
By most estimates there are more slaves today than in any other point in history and it's almost entire in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. Instead of helping those people, putting sanctions on the countries and companies turning a blind eye on slavery, or even acknowledging that slavery is not history but an ongoing condition - the West spins its wheels changing language in highly unrelated fields.
The absurdity of it all is something out of Camus.
Pirates were referred to as the "enemy of all mankind":
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545158/enemy-of-all...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52783845-enemy-of-all-ma...
Primary means it is the "main" one, but it doesn't imply any controlling relationship. It's kind of like "first".
Whereas "master" (in this context) means it has control or power over other things. For example a "master switch" would override all other switches. Or a "master cylinder" on a car controls the slave cylinder.
It's a real shame that they're making things less clear to fix an imagined problem.
As long as you are taking it at face value you will continue to be confused in this way, and you will continue to lose.
And it wouldn’t be even that improbable, in my opinion at least. In the end, in many languages the word “figuratively” was so overused as a stand in for “literally”, that it became it informal synonym (I know for sure that it is a thing in both English and Polish, but it is probably more widespread). If words of completely opposite meaning can be blurred that way, it wouldn’t be so strange for that effect to emerge as a case of euphemism.
As in, to describe actual human slavery?
Most English-speaking countries don't have actual human slavery any more (or at least, they don't use the words master and slave to describe it.) So when using the words master and slave to refer to actual slavery, it's usually in a historical sense, and it seems unlikely that we'd change the words we use to refer to something in the past.
Sorry, but I do not understand the question. Do you mean as to distinguish slavery relationship in logical systems (as with databases) versus human relations? If so, that wasn’t my intention.
What I was talking about was more about a euphemism replacing an actual word, as with taboo avoidance:
> This terminology for the animal originated as a taboo avoidance term: proto-Germanic tribes replaced their original word for bear — arkto — with this euphemistic expression out of fear that speaking the animal's true name might cause it to appear. According to author Ralph Keyes, this is the oldest known euphemism. [0]
Here, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with the _thing_ being referred to (a password, in this case.) The issue is that the commonly used word _also_ has some other associations. So picking a different word means you lose those associations. Not the same thing at all.
It does make one wonder, if there was more diversity in CS when these things were being made whether "master-slave" analogies would have made it in or whether other analogies like "parent-child", "major-minor", "leader-follower" or similar would have made it in.
[0] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/03/10/new-git-default-bra...
In the end it doesn't really matter once the word has gotten tainted. It's still ugly that incorrect deductions spread so quickly and corrections don't.
It is an ___extreme___ problem if somebody now thought [I change the tense out of refusal] that the term 'master' should not be used, especially if the perverse excuse were that someone used it in a way that makes somebody uncomfortable.
Following an old proverb, reportedly from or nobilitated by Cervantes, you are invited "not to mention the rope in the house of the hanged". But never in history, to the best of my knowledge, someone ever advanced the idea that given that people had been hanged, the term 'rope' should stop being used at all.
The term 'master' is innocent. And it has close to fullest right to be part of the language.
And there is a further matter of care given these desperate times in history: suspicion that a war against the semantic of "master" could be involved, given the many raising voices making all individuals equivalent in intellect, preparation and judgement, in the area of Asimov's warning:
«The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge"»
However, languages live and the people of the USA are an important determinant of where the English language is headed. They have a particular history involving this word, and that history has not been fully reckoned with. It makes sense that the same word, although in other contexts with a slightly different meaning, would be redefined or removed this way, in order to deal with that history.
Natural languages violate the sort of origins and logical meanings all the time, so this does not have to be an exception.
don't you think this way the enemy wins a battle?
Terrorists attempt bending politics through terrorizing: if one is terrorized, is that one not playing their game?
We greet in some sensible way, say, and somebody comes and promotes the greeting as now meaning "short people should stick to accounting": that somebody should not be nobilitated and their """cultural proposal""" accepted as norm: it should be discarded as noise. If the greeting were affected and linked to some unworthy agenda, that would mean empowering said agenda: it should have been impotent, but with your attention, and attributing it legitimacy in the creation of constraints, you made it powerful.
«Languages live», but uprooted they go astray. A rubberband, like that vetting attitude you (yes really you) have been trained to develop, should always there to check validity, vis-a-vis what terms mean, coremost to how they are used. One is supposed not to forget that core.
"Congratulations for having defaced our public square by defecating in the middle: you now get the privilege to do similarly with our sacred vocabulary".
So should not we speak language, as an attempt, instead of «USA [determined] English language» or «natural language»?
And more to the point, should not we avoid acting as resonance chambers amplifying deeds? Some culturally inferior party is not supposed to bend culture with the "strength of inferiority" - that is absurd. It is not a "de facto" bending, it is the "de facto" response to it that gives it power.
That is nonsensical. There is no such thing as a line language should not stray too far from. Languages are what they are, plain and simple. The fact that you speak English, is already a horrible affront to the French, the Celts, Angles, Saxons, both in their current day form and that of yesteryear, and any precursors to those languages in turn. English shouldn't even have the Latin-derived 'master' in the first place, if we're going that way.
I am absolutely sensitive to the argument that 'master' originally, or in some other context, is not opposed by 'slave', but 'inferior' or somesuch. And it is how I've used the word, and how it and its native equivalent is used in my native tongue. But that is no argument for fixing a particular meaning or context as more important or 'native' than any other.
Language is fundamentally, deeply promiscuous, and English may be the most promiscuous of them all. If this is a problem for you, your best bet is a dead language, or one you create yourself. You can fork anything you wish after all, that's how languages work :)
You missed from my argument that the above statement is part of my argument: it is normal for language to also represent controversial (contextually) cases, but «that is no argument for fixing [such] particular meaning or context as more important» or having priority over, especially, its core meaning.
You are missing that I oppose an appropriation, that reduces of that richness of applications to a "yes but, you see, we cannot forget what happened in Khartoum, there is no return from that episode and now if you mention it I can only think of the event". No, the richness is intact, you are covering it. And the subsequent argument I proposed, replying to you, contains: beware while covering it of not being supportive to some political effort you would otherwise oppose.
Example: one extremist a few years ago apparently instructed his followers, their music shall be that of Depeche Mode - their guts should resonate with that; the authors of «the grabbing hands grab all they can» and «we are going backwards, to a caveman mentality» showed being less than impressed. If people stopped listening to Depeche Mode because an extremist finds their sound instrumental to hook underdeveloped prefrontals, and now there is an association, they should be dehypnotized. The extremist or another could have invented that 'depeche' is now a world that means their attempt world domination: I am not saying that Gore Gahan and Fletcher have a full right to the word, I am saying that one would not be justified to call the word "now embarassing" because some fool came up with his low fumes.
If we measured our associations with the worse in society, we would be in deep trouble, repeat:
supporting and justifying associations following the worse in society is a recipe for collective damage.
Never empower the "wrong side". If already you allow them to bend your vocabulary...
Technically, for the rest: a term is a pattern, one can apply it metaphorically to a large number of cases. (Its transliteration is largely irrelevant - 'jñāna', 'gnoscere', 'know'...) The core meaning is found navigating to the "original" pattern behind all applications. Etymology helps you with that. Forgetting the core pattern is what I called uprooting.
Meanwhile, here in the good ol' USA, we might have mucked up that elegant latin lesson a little bit [0]
0 - http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/enslavement/tex...
* the first term I could think of, probably as I am writing from a field having plenty of them nearby.
well that's the funny thing about language - it's very democratized in some ways. After a while, if even 10% of people use it to actively mean something sexual, the majority of people will know that it's meant to indicate something sexual.
You've reinvented dialects.
Cites:
* https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/978019953...
* https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/don...
if the analogy had been "master-apprentice" instead there probably wouldnt be as much pushback everywhere else. while this particular instance might be an over correction, i think the overall trend has been a move in the right direction
Except, you know, apprentices eventually become masters themselves. And the space isn't zero-sum; "Master Verrochio taught Master Leonardo" is semantically valid. It doesn't illustrate the semantics of, say, data replication where there is only one master at a time and the slaves are not supposed to be promoted. "Master-slave" captures the relationship succinctly.
True, it hearkens back to a dark time in US history but if that is the only criteria for censoring usage of this term, are we not also censoring discussions about this period? I agree with the sentiment to be ashamed of it but to the point where you can't even derive metaphors from it? Reeks of cowardly denial.
I think the GP's rope analogy paints a pretty good picture. Should we stop using the word "rope"? Rope has been used in a horrific way in the past.
So not like a historical master-slave relationship.
Master-slave may capture the relationship, but humans still have to read, write and interact with those systems.
Some of those humans still suffer from the legacy of slavery, jim crow and voter suppression.
We can come up with analogies and metaphors which arent so evocative and make working with systems more pleasant just on account of not flippantly referencing the darkest part of societies history.
If we as a society move to a state where a metaphor like so is verboten just because it is less pleasant or already considered "evocative" then how can we have deep and nuanced discussions on this period itself? You know the ones where we explicitly acknowledge the horrors of slave dehumanization, the terrible working conditions in the plantations, the violence stemming from these racist beliefs, among others.
Those issues are too heavy to be evoked by the metaphor (and frankly irrelevant to its purpose) and yet our current trajectory would want people to do away with it when it only serves to illustrates the relationship between computing resources. It's not even a comment on social history.
blacklist predates black people being enslaved in America.
It's PC war on words that distorted their original meaning.
A "glass masters of Murano" makes beautiful art with glass, because he's a master in that craft.
Doesn't matter if the word has been distorted to mean something bad for a brief period of human history.
Slave is the offending word, not master.
We should have master branch or master database, but secondary branch and secondary database, instead of "slave" ones.
Amid the currently fashionable trend of language culling, I was mildly surprised to find myself agreeing with this particular change: In git, I think "main" is a better choice than "master", because it more accurately and succinctly reflects the intent.
(In general, though, I think the trend is misguided and counterproductive.)
You can install and use Gnome/KDE apps on other desktops as well. It's just a bit dependency heavy.
Master does not mean the same as Primary. Master does not mean the same as Main. Efforts to replace Master with alternative, less precise words make it harder to understand what things are actually meant to be doing.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_n...
The #1 failure of social justice activist movements worldwide is to suggest that people who don't agree with a particular policy must somehow be racist/sexist.
It's the giant bit of gaslighting that discredits the movement, and frankly, in some cases, reveals 'truer intentions'.
The assumption that arbitrary words must have anything to do with reality, interpretation, applied nuance or discrimination is problematic to say the least.
As I alluded to in my other reply in this thread [which got downvoted into oblivion] the problem with these SJWs is that their world view is so parochial and [in terms of time] narrow, that they think these terms are offensive because "slavery"... "racism"... even when the terms and their connotations often pre-date their worldview or even their country.
A previous classic example was the same kind of people getting their knickers in a twist over the use of the adjective "black" to describe something bad because... yep, you got it... "slavery"... "racism"...
Anyone with the slightest bit of historical and cultural awareness would realise that the use of "black" as an adjective with negative connotations dates back centuries, if not millennia and blindingly obviously originates from early religious connotations of light being good and darkness being filled with danger and evil. But, of course, to the SJWs, any use of "black' in a negative sense has got to be a veiled reference to American slavery by those evil racists and their non-inclusive language.
It was a black day for the world, when this political correct bullshit became the only acceptable form of expression.
Source: born there
And contextually, 'slave' comes from 'Slav', not the opposite: you meet a Pispathian, you decide that a "pisp" (which incidentally in local language with a good chance means "valiant" or similar) is a reifiable one of a reifiable people, and after the insult they should also change their name?!
> some Slavic countries might request their naming and history be changed to something delinked from slavery... Shall we rename Slovenia and Slovakia, too?
If they want to rename themselves, we should use their new names.
Edit: read my original sentence as "and after the insult they should also be thought considering changing their name?!".
-- those who think that language is what median people use and that naive use has a right to be accepted and create rules, seeing language as a social matter, and
-- those who think that language is what the learned have built out of competence and reflection, calling language an entity rightfully separate from societies.
For both parties «language matters». But they do not speak the same language - the second party refuses to accept bastard semantics, illegitimately born "from the saddle of incompetence". Their conclusions are opposite.
There is no party that refuses to accept "bastard" semantics; in no language does there exist a fraction of a syllable of legitimate descent. The only recourse open to the pedant and misanthrope is to forgo the use of language altogether, which would in your case constitute a marked improvement in the discourse.
By the way: you have completely misunderstood 'is' in the quotation. It was not descriptive language, it was deontic.
And for what your «which would in your case constitute a marked improvement in the discourse»: this is the first time I find myself in front of the shallow disrespect that I expect elsewhere from YCombinator. Happily - look around -, with that attitude, you are the one isolated.
Not arguing that it should or shouldn't be changed. They can change it for alliteration for all I care. Just want to talk about this etymology because that interests me.
master, n.1 and adj.
[...]
Origin: Of multiple origins. Partly a borrowing from Latin. Partly a borrowing from French. Etymons: Latin magistr-, magister; French maistre.
[...]
The classical Latin word has numerous Romance and Germanic derivatives, e.g. Italian maestro (compare maestro n.), Spanish maestro, Portuguese mestre (compare maistry n.); Old Frisian mastere, mestere (West Frisian master), Middle Dutch meester, meister, mester (Dutch meester), Old Saxon mēstar (Middle Low German mēster, mester, meyster, Low German meester), Old High German maistar, maister, meistar, meister (Middle High German meister, German Meister; compare Meistersinger n.), Old Icelandic meistari (Icelandic meistari), Norwegian (Nynorsk) meister, Old Swedish mæstare (Swedish mästare), Old Danish mester (Danish mester). See also mistress n.
Senses in all four branches are paralleled by uses in Latin, in branch A. III. initially reflecting use of Latin magister in the medieval universities.
With uses at branch A. IV., compare adjectival use in French in the sense ‘principal’ (applied to people from c1100 in Old French, to material objects and immaterial things from the 12th cent. in Anglo-Norman); compare also Italian maestro , used adjectivally in this sense from the 14th cent.
[..."Master-gate" was the closest I could find to master password or key...]
Compounds
C2. Applied in extended use to things, with the sense ‘main’, ‘principal’, ‘controlling’, ‘originating’. In such compounds master is generally construed as a noun, but in some cases the grammatical character of the compound is uncertain or fluctuating, and master may be considered to be functioning as an adjective.
a. Of material things. Esp. frequent in terms relating to building and the human body (in non-technical use), and later to machinery, electronics, etc.
master-gate n.
1340 Ayenbite (1866) 249 (MED) Þe mouþ..is þe mayster gate of þe castele of þe herte.
a1500 (▸?c1450) Merlin 422 He com to the maister yate of the paleys.
c1720 N. Dubois & G. Leoni tr. A. Palladio Architecture II. iii. 7 The chief Entry, or Master gate.
1998 Re: Sad Sight on Test Center in rec.games.computer.ultima.online (Usenet newsgroup) 8 Feb. I created a new character and walked through a Master Gate to do exactly what you do.
that's why I am on team Lighbringer... go Luci, go!
they had no bad connotation when they were introduced, but then they were used by "bad people" (by current standards) and now they are "dead" or rather "not to be used"
I guess it's the same in English :)
But times change
to put it in another way: if master has to be removed because of slavery in america, then we should also remove the words chain, boat and trade.
I am able to connect chains to slavery, but pussy?
The fight over every day language is a tool of opresive regimes, e.g. Hitler used it, Stalin used it, the DDR used it. I miss evidence that this fight has ever yielded positive outcomes.