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I always find myself having layers of skepticism about this stuff. Layer one: come on. Context matters. Do people really freak out about words in isolation tha

by api 7y ago

I always find myself having layers of skepticism about this stuff. Layer one: come on. Context matters. Do people really freak out about words in isolation that resemble words in unrelated sentences? That's silly. Layer two: Do people really do that? I know a lot of very left-of-center "woke" people (of various kinds) and I never hear this kind of thing. I have never heard someone get offended at a "slave" database or "quantum supremacy" or even "male" vs "female" plugs. People I know seem capable of parsing context and know that if I talk about a male connector going into a female connector I am talking about plugs and not gender politics and there is no additional subtext intended. Maybe I just don't know these over-reactive people who are incapable of parsing complete sentences, discerning context and subtext, and detecting social cues. ... or maybe these people are largely a figment of the reactionary right ...? I can't tell whether that's the case because this is just not a thing I see in my slice of the real world. The whole "based" vs "woke" reactionary right vs histrionic left flame war seems like something from a parallel universe that I don't inhabit, a universe where the human brain never evolved the capacity to parse language in units larger than two words. Huge shrug... All I do know is that there are better things to do than care about any of this stuff.

Junk_Collector 7y ago
In my own anecdotal experience it's very few people and even then they are each only particularly offended about some rather specific subset of words. They just happen to be very vocal about it and then they usually have some cadre of people who don't particularly care about the word/phrase, but get upset that you upset someone in their group. I also seem to encounter this much more often within academia than business. The internet tends to amplify things, especially twitter. That said, I was recently discussing a legacy instrument control setup with a customer (GPIB based) and was discussing the master slave controller and they got agitated with my wording. Eventually I realized what was going on and we switched to Main/Secondary and everybody was happy. I'm never going to pick an ideological argument with a customer especially when there is actual work to be done, but I got a private laugh later because Master and Slave were embossed on the connector name plates.
- api 7y ago
  > it's very few people > They just happen to be very vocal > The internet tends to amplify things, especially twitter. Yeah, that's kind of what I suspected.
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birdyrooster 7y ago
I suspect you might realize that people reacting to words out of context might be dealing with trauma. It’s not so simple as discounting people’s reactions as the inability to finish reading a sentence. Is it really that much effort to say master and agent instead of master and slave?

by api 7y ago

Junk_Collector 7y ago

In my own anecdotal experience it's very few people and even then they are each only particularly offended about some rather specific subset of words. They just happen to be very vocal about it and then they usually have some cadre of people who don't particularly care about the word/phrase, but get upset that you upset someone in their group. I also seem to encounter this much more often within academia than business. The internet tends to amplify things, especially twitter. That said, I was recently discussing a legacy instrument control setup with a customer (GPIB based) and was discussing the master slave controller and they got agitated with my wording. Eventually I realized what was going on and we switched to Main/Secondary and everybody was happy. I'm never going to pick an ideological argument with a customer especially when there is actual work to be done, but I got a private laugh later because Master and Slave were embossed on the connector name plates.

api 7y ago
> it's very few people > They just happen to be very vocal > The internet tends to amplify things, especially twitter. Yeah, that's kind of what I suspected.

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birdyrooster 7y ago

I suspect you might realize that people reacting to words out of context might be dealing with trauma. It’s not so simple as discounting people’s reactions as the inability to finish reading a sentence. Is it really that much effort to say master and agent instead of master and slave?