The word isn't really my issue, although I cannot argue it's poorly constructed.

My issue is the idea that one person or group can universally dictate that "X is offensive to Y." That's an impossible thing to do, and it has a side effect of dictating what's offensive instead of responding to what's offensive.

I have no horse in the SJW goings on, but my casual observation has been that there's as much creation of social taboos as there is attempts to raise awareness of existing ones. In either event, a one-size-fits-all approach is misguided.

It's definitely a crappy word out of context, and the defensiveness is probably to be expected. Who are you calling aggressive!...

On the other hand, it's routinely frustrating when especially technical communities, full to bursting with misappropriations of common terms, seem especially unable to see past the letters in a word to its meaning in context. Maybe we just intrinsically don't believe that other areas of inquiry could be so complex as to need their own jargon...

One problem is that most fields accept that their jargon is in fact jargon that folks have to learn. Some chunk of SJ folks don't, which is dismaying because it ignores educational privilege.

That's a good point, though I don't think it's such an uncommon thing; think of the beginning programmer who has to be laboriously convinced that the first definition they learned for "type" or "function" is not the meaning of that word.

I'd speculate that true appreciation for jargon comes more from multidisciplinary studies than anything else, so in any field the most passionate, least experienced members are likely to make a mess of things-- and if there's one thing the activist community has in surplus it's members with a high passion:experience ratio.

Having acknowledged that issue, I'm still reluctant to excuse anyone in this case, simply because we're talking about a term that doesn't have any other meaning. If you see a word you've never heard before, and think "I can probably figure out what this refers to based on its sounds" with Google sitting right there, naah, the problem isn't the jargon.

Edit: Like, seriously, would this happen if the word was "microclimate" or "microevolution"? Yeah, on the YouTube comments, but not usually on HN.

That is a really good point about the uniqueness of the term.

Also, I had completely forgotten that "function" also means, like, cocktail parties.

Heh, love it. "Can you call that function next door and find out if it's ever going to halt?"