Microsoft Architect Steve Marx tweeted on the issue with:

This is truly getting out of hand … (I mean the lynching, not the jokes.)

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To which she bravely responded:

and I'm upset I had to listen to the stuff behind me yesterday. I'm Black. Has anyone in your family been ever encountered lynching?"

And

@smarx Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is

And it reads like Steve Marx was supporting her too. I can't believe her response! I imagine she misunderstood, from reading so many insults on twitter.

That's not bravery. It's just cheap anti-intellectualism.

He cough cough was being sarcastic about the bravery bit.

Thanks. It's been hard to tell sometimes, in this thread.

From the Oxford dictionary website:

Definition of lynch verb [with object] (of a group of people) kill (someone) for an alleged offence without a legal trial, especially by hanging

While I do realize that there are certain connotations in America as it being aimed towards African Americans, as a non American my understanding of it has always been that it is not an act aimed at a specific race. Rather a group enacting their own law without trial usually because standard legal proceedings would be viewed as a forgone failure due to lack of evidence etc. which the group would not find satisfying.

In the US, lynching is heavily linked to racism, so much so that uses of the word are effectively captured by that racist legacy. If you are going to get into a dialog with a black person and you are white or white passing, do not use the word lynch or lynching ever unless you are talking about historical events or a person whose name is Lynch.

There's another moral of the story here: if a woman is anywhere near you, never say something that could possibly be interpreted as sexual.

"Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right" -Ricky Gervais

This is one of those situations where a word was used with proper english definition and was taken completely out of context for the sake of argument. To trace that to a racist undertone is the fault of the reader and a lack of reading comprehension (taking tone and context is important).

I think it is well beyond the time when we as a society need to understand that certain words (lynching among them) are just words.

If you want to see racial undertones when the word was used in a different context, that's your choice. It's no longer part of the meaning of the word, just like ghetto does not refer to the area of Germany where Jews were forced to live.