Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by kgwgk on Sunday December 18, 2022 @01:39PM (#34041029)

I don’t think I had seen those before:

tarball [use instead: tar archive] While the term refers to an archive that has been created with the tar command, it can be negatively associated with the pejorative term tarbaby.

whitespace [use instead: empty space] Assigns value connotations based on color (white = good), an act which is subconsciously racialized.

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by el-salvador on Sunday December 18, 2022 @03:04PM (#34042356)

> its roots lie in Spain's colonization of South American countries.

They forgot Central American countries :(

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by kgwgk on Sunday December 18, 2022 @03:28PM (#34042833)

South of the border, down Mexico way...

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by umanwizard on Sunday December 18, 2022 @06:23PM (#34045446)

And North American ones (Mexico and the Caribbean).

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by eru on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @12:24AM (#34061886)

Also much of the US.

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by outside1234 on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @12:23AM (#34061875)

And California where they are :)

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by erichocean on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @12:56AM (#34062094)

Florida says hi.

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by outside1234 on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @10:15AM (#34066995)

Sorry - not saying that Florida or Texas don't have the same experience - just that Stanford should know better being literally in a former Spanish colony.

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by erichocean on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @06:37PM (#34074487)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Florida

> Spanish Florida (Spanish: La Florida) was the first major European land claim and attempted settlement in North America during the European Age of Discovery.

Is this not widely known?

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by outside1234 on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @06:40PM (#34074525)

Yes - sorry - my point was more that Stanford IS IN a former colony and should know better on some of this stuff (not that Florida isn't a former holding etc.)

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by erichocean on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @06:48PM (#34074618)

No worries, all good.

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by layer8 on Sunday December 18, 2022 @06:41PM (#34045769)

I also don’t see how “person who has immigrated” constitutes defining people by multiple characteristics.

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by sacnoradhq on Monday December 19, 2022 @08:53PM (#34060562)

Wut?

They jumped the shark(tm) on tarball.

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by tum92 on Monday December 19, 2022 @11:15PM (#34061461)

I had to look that one up because their interpretation seemed so unlikely to me. Doesn’t necessarily mean there is no other history there, but I found out tarballs are real things.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarball_(oil)

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by eru on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @12:24AM (#34061880)

An immigrant might have also just acquired citizenship..

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by amluto on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @12:31AM (#34061941)

Surely tarball comes from tar, which is short for “tape archive”, which has nothing to do with the goo left behind from pyrolysis or with its color. Apparently whoever made this list doesn’t understand the purpose of the tar command :)

(Y’all should really stop conflating tar with asphalt though. The terms are related but not always interchangeable.)

Whitespace is pathetic. Even the article itself has a white background. In any case, in a lot of modern programmer usage, whitespace is not empty. Saying that empty space is significant in some file format would be rather silly. White_space is part of the Unicode standard, TYVM.

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by laserdancepony on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @08:30AM (#34065578)

That's exactly my impression. The lunatics driving this mad train of hate over fields they have no expertise in whatsoever are conflating things left and right that are denoting different concepts who aren't interchangeable.

Reminds me of that woman who forced the change of master branch into main at github while posing as a "programmer" or "security researcher". I looked into her profile, only PRs for typos in documentation or cruft like that. No serious contribution. Only hate.

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by naasking on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @12:43AM (#34062019)

> Using person-first language helps to not define people by just one of their characteristics

For people so obsessed with language, it seems pretty silly to so readily conflate "definition" with "classification".

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by hedora on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @12:54AM (#34062085)

Latinx is an example of grammatical colonialism at its finest. It's favoring cultural misappropriation of a non-english word over using the proper English adjective "Latin".

I give it 1-2 more years before being put out to pasture with "African American".

[Edit: Also, WTF? Indigenous people from the US are supposed to be called Latinx now?]

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by derbOac on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @01:21AM (#34062291)

Interestingly, I've seen a lot of pushback against "Latinx" as a term from DEI circles themselves, that it's seen as too purely academic and detached from real-world use by individuals that the label would apply to. So there's something odd to me about that suggestion only because it seems to be replacing one term with an equally or more problematic term.

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by erosenbe0 on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @01:58AM (#34062548)

Latino/Latinx is not a direct substitute for Hispanic. To recommend that as a find/replace is highly irresponsible. People in Spain or from Spain are often or usually considered Hispanic but respectfully do not appropriate Latin-American/Latino identity.

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by cryptonector on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @02:36AM (#34062780)

One can be an immigrant and a [naturalized] citizen at the same time. "Immigrant" means that you moved [here] from [elsewhere], and decidedly does not mean "non-citizen"!

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by davrosthedalek on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @05:22AM (#34063965)

Also, the vast majority of immigrants are citizens [of a different country] and the vast majority of non-citizen [of the country they currently reside in] are not immigrants [but tourists, people on a non-immigrant visa, etc.].

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