The word "shrill" (unlike "screeching") is absolutely gendered. It's still fine to use it, and I wouldn't have made, well, any of these edits, but there is nothing unhinged about the comment you're replying to. Don't go looking for enemies on HN threads!

I stated exactly what was unhinged about GP's comment. This whole thing is unhinged. That's my opinion, and that of many others, not some quest for "enemies on HN threads". What a weird take by you.

You, GP, and anyone else seeking justification for silently altering beloved works into newspeak ought to grab a hold of yourselves. That isn't empathy, it's Orwellian censorship to an obvious and absurd degree. As pointed out all over this thread and elsewhere, this is worse than burning books in some ways.

And no, shrill isn't "gendered" any more than "screeching" is. For fuck sake. Every word an author chooses is chosen with care for flavour and tone. Leave them the fuck alone.

Yelling doesn't make the argument more persuasive. Not only is the word "shrill" gendered, it's famously gendered. If you were writing an article about the concept of gendered words, you could do worse than opening with the word "shrill". You could just Google this.

Again: none of this --- nothing I've said, and nothing about the comment you've chosen to angrily respond to --- implies that these changes are good. Maybe the previous commenter believes that; I don't know. But I can't read that out of anything they actually wrote.

I understand the urge to find someone, anyone, to take the other side of your argument. It's no fun to yell at the clouds! But you have to wait for someone to actually make the other argument. You can't just attribute it to people and then hammer away at them.

Your comments in this thread have unfortunately been well into the flamewar zone that the site guidelines ask users to stay out of.

Since we just asked you to stop doing it and you've kept doing it, I think we have to ban this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I made a point of turning off the flags on this submission—I don't have any problem with the article and you can see from my comments in the thread what I think of these edits to Dahl. But you still can't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how provocative someone's comments are or you feel they are.

FWIW, while tptacek's comments to you were probably slightly edgier than usual and maybe a bit over the line, 'gaslighting' seems like a big exaggeration to me.