The purpose of this website is to educate people about the possible impact of the words we use. Language affects different people in different ways. We are not attempting to assign levels of harm to the terms on this site. We also are not attempting to address all informal uses of language.
This website focuses on potentially harmful terms used in the United States, starting with a list of everyday language and terminology. Our "suggested alternatives" are in line with those used by peer institutions and within the technology community.
They say "we are not attempting to assign levels of harm to the terms on this site", and then proceed to list a huge number of terms, some of which are almost universally viewed as discriminatory or harmful and some of which are almost universally viewed as _not_ discriminatory or harmful. They may not be explicitly claiming that these terms have equivalent negative impact, but the presentation does nothing to suggest otherwise, and in many cases neither do the explanations.
As I said in my original comment, it's an "arson, murder, and jaywalking" approach - as if someone had just given you a list saying "these things are illegal, don't do them" without noting that one of them can be punished by life in prison and another is so widely disregarded that it'll be viewed as odd if you never do it.
I still think my original question stands - why wouldn’t I want to avoid most of these terms? Isn’t the list useful if I would?
I object to the existence of this particular list because I think it's extremely poorly done - to the point of being actively harmful to efforts to reduce offensive language - and would be incredibly confusing to anyone who didn't already have the fairly deep linguistic and cultural competence required to know which parts to take seriously and which parts to ignore.
I don't object to the general existence of lists of this type, but I do think they're often subject to the same pathologies this one is.
> I still think my original question stands - why wouldn’t I want to avoid most of these terms? Isn’t the list useful if I would?
I think a huge section of this list is not helpful to anybody. "Red team", "yellow team", and "black box" have nothing to do with race whatsoever, for example, nor would a reasonable person think they did; eliminating them from your vocabulary would do no more to address racial injustice than eliminating "armadillo" would. And I do think there are costs to urging people to monitor their speech to greater and greater degrees for rapidly decreasing - and in many cases zero - benefit.
I wish online forums encouraged civil discussion like this more than they seem to. So much knee-jerk even here.
1. By saying certain phrases could be understood to be harmful, even when they aren't commonly understood to be and explicitly don't have racist or sexist etymologies, the list is actually reinforcing the threads of harmful stereotypes in our language. Black box is not a racist term; adding it to a list like this just associates black=bad, which is not something we should want at all.
2. Lists like this encourage black-and-white thinking about language that ignores context. It's the same sort of thinking that leads to your white uncle complaining that rappers use the n word, so why can't he? Words don't hurt; how words are used hurt.
3. Lists like this are ripe for abuse. While I have heard interesting discussions about how certain language can be harmful (The Allusionist podcast recently had an interesting discussion over terms like neuro-divergent, neuro-typical, autism and so on), it is often used in a bullying way to dismiss and discredit someone who is trying to engage in good faith rather than to educate. Consider "rule of thumb". The etymology presented is wrong, but wide spread. Maybe the fact that many people believe this is enough to avoid it, but the list doesn't present this nuance and instead perpetuates the myth.
"We are not attempting to assign levels of harm to the terms on this site" means literally nothing but "we shouldn't be held accountable for intermingling actual racial slurs with misinterpreted Wikipedia articles".
I don't see how trying to cover your ass at the start of an article somehow invalidates the content of the article.
Hmm, I bet they also drank water after hunting down Jews. Drinking water literally makes you a Nazi!
Seriously though, where does this stop? Don't they see the absurdity? It almost feels like absurdity is the goal.
Except that 'treadmills' were used as punishment devices in prisons, so the preferred alternative is 'euphemism exercise machine'. Except that "exercise" is ableist and so the real preferred alternative is...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hep-Hep_riots
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hip_hip_hooray
I've heard the earlier theory (that it was an acronym for "Hierosolyma est perdita" which was supposed to have been a Crusader slogan), but Wiktionary thinks this is a false etymology.
I'm Ashkenazi Jewish and have never heard any Jewish or non-Jewish person claim to have personally associated the "hip hip hooray" cheer with antisemitism. Perhaps that association, even if it's etymologically incorrect, would have been top-of-mind for many Europeans in the 1820s, but I don't think that's so today.
Which Red Army? Unless it's the Chinese Red Army (which I have no knowledge about), but rather the Russian (Soviet) Red Army, then, firstly, the battle cry of its soldiers was not "hip-hip hooray", but rather "ura" (cognate of the English "hurrah"); and, secondly, this battle cry is much older than the Red Army. It's an old word; almost certainly a borrowing into Russian; but in which century (seventeenth? sixteenth? older?), and from which language, I do not know.
Most etymologies attributed to acronyms for words pre-20th century are usually false.
You'd be incorrect, as I happen to know a Jew who some might consider "based" and knowingly says things like "...so I Jewed it..." and so on. Like, he literally just comes out and says these things in casual conversation and humour.
Pretty much no one would claim the n-word is not a slur just because some black people use it amongst each other.
"Finding something offensive" is not mutually exclusive with "doing that thing yourself".
Here's two almost-adjacent entries:
> hip-hip hurray, hip hip hooray > This term was used by German citizens during the Holocaust as a rallying cry when they would hunt down Jewish citizens living in segregated neighborhoods.
> Jewed > This term is based on a stereotype that people of Jewish descent are cheap and/or hoard money.
The latter is, as I said, a well-known slur that any Jew would find offensive. The former is an extremely commonplace expression which is allegedly offensive due to a history that I've never in my life heard of before, and which seems on a quick search to be quite dubiously evidenced.
Without knowing the actual context of these, one might very well be persuaded by this list that "hip, hip, hooray" was more offensive than "Jewed" - after all, a rallying cry for a genocide sounds more harmful than a mere ethnic stereotype!