For him that word has a different meaning and interpretation than to you.

> committed to .config/git/config

In his personal dotfiles repo.

That's not how words work. The entire point of using words is that they are well-known abstractions used when communicating to other people.

It would be nice if definitions were well-known and stable but there seems to be a significant number of people working against that ideal in favor of definitions that are malleable and curated (some might say policed) by various preferred groups.

IMHO, this is the source of quite a bit of division of late.

Like pronouns?

Different people have different interpretations of certain words depending on various factors (environment, culture, etc), and don't forget that words change meaning over time. He is simply coming from a culture where that word has evolved into being a generic insult. This is even more likely especially because it is a private repo, he would be less interested in writing in a way accessible to others compared to a public repo.

> The entire point of using words is that they are well-known abstractions used when communicating to other people

I will disagree with this, and so will every diary-owner and note-taker. In addition, even if this was true there are various languages (like tut) which are intended to be used within a specific community, just because something is written it does not mean that it needs to be understood by everyone, although it is desirable in public projects. Not to mention that this statement assumes that he knew that they would interpret it in a way which he did not intent.

Anyway, he made a new commit earlier today without it: https://git.tyil.nl/dotfiles/commit/?id=891b7a7a31941dfe253c...

...which is why those intent on pushing their narrative into every nook and cranny of society start by redefining commonly used words like 'racism', 'oppression', 'equity', 'woman' etc.

Yes, words have meanings. Those meanings may shift, language evolves after all. This is not what happens currently though when words are forcibly redefined to fit a certain narrative. This is a language revolution by means of revolutionary language.

The so-called 'n-word' and the absolute ban on its use by 'whites' where the version ending with 'a' seems to be used in every other line of most rap lyrics is in this comparable to the Dutch word for a homosexual man ('flikker') which was banned from common use but taken up as a nom-de-guerre by homosexual men. This habit of seeding the field of language with linguistic landmines has done nothing to ease tensions, the opposite is true. This is a relatively recent development as can be seen by watching earlier commercials: bout a week ago I happened to play a video of the first two hours of MTV [1] in the corner of my screen when my ears and eyes were drawn to a commercial about 'The United Negro College Fund' [2] using its full name. The fund still exists but I'm hard-pressed seeing them use their full name in any advertising campaign now due to the stigma attached to the word 'negro', according to an entry in the talk page [3] they are in the process of changing their name because of this. This commercial was 40 years old.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJtiPRDIqtI

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNCF

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:UNCF#United_Fund