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 jus

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.