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I would agree "slave" seems a weird choice of a word but I can see nothing wrong in "master". Not a single moment in my life I thought about slavery when hearin

I would agree "slave" seems a weird choice of a word but I can see nothing wrong in "master". Not a single moment in my life I thought about slavery when hearing/seeing the word "master". Should we also rename master degrees perhaps?

PurpleFoxy 6y ago
Master bedroom, master record, master copy. The word master is just a synonym for main.
- lanternfish 6y ago
  It should be noted that of all of the ways master is used in this thread, master bedroom is pretty high up there in bad history and connotation. The etymology derives from the 'master of the house', a term which historically served to diminish the agency of wives, servants, and slaves. I don't know about master/main, but I could definitely get behind renaming master bedrooms.
- nayaketo 6y ago
  Company I'm currently working for deals with real estate drawings. We were notified recently that we're changing "Master bedroom" to "Main bedroom" too.
- roel_v 6y ago
  'Master bedroom' is going out of real estate descriptions, being replaced by 'main bedroom'. E.g. https://www.housebeautiful.com/lifestyle/fun-at-home/a1087/master-bedroom-politically-incorrect/ https://www.housebeautiful.com/lifestyle/fun-at-home/a1087/m... but that's just the first google hit, there's plenty out there. In Dutch (both in .nl and .be), the English term 'master bedroom' was fashionable for a few years, until the stigma of that term carried over from the Anglosphere and it's now being replaced (in the woke areas of the country) with 'ouderslaapkamer', which is literally translated 'parent bedroom'. Although now that term itself is 'controversial' (not mainstream controversial, more in small hardcore circles, so I'm not sure if this will actually become an issue) because (to the best of my understanding of this objection) 'parent bedroom' implies that the 2-parents-with-children family form is normative (you can't make this up if you tried to), which it shouldn't be. Not sure what my point is, maybe that using 'master' for 'main' is no longer outright commonly accepted usage?
  - jlokier 6y ago
    About 'parent bedroom', a lot of houses are occupied by house-sharers these days. Some sharers get the 'parent bedroom', others get the non-parent bedroom but they are all the same age. It makes some sense to change the description.
    - roel_v 6y ago
      That's a utilitarian argument (I think?) that I could get behind (not that anyone asks for my opinion on what rooms should be called). From that POV I guess it would be best to just call any room that isn't a kitchen or bathroom just 'room' and let buyers decide. But then again, most people don't have much imagination and like to be shown how space can or is intended to be used, much like how a neatly decorated house sells easier than an empty or cluttered one. But the objections I read about last summer (tried looking but I can't find it any more) were moral, that the term is also 'oppressive' (not sure if that's the actual term they used, that was the gist of it), basically the same arguments that are made for removing 'master' from Git, language frames our thinking etc.
  - plett 6y ago
    In the UK, lots of real estate descriptions side-step the problem completely and use terms like 'Bedroom 1' for the largest bedroom and 'Bedroom 2' etc for the 2nd largest.
  - stephen_g 6y ago
    I'd never heard of any stigma around the word 'master' until today... It's still as commonly used to refer to master bedrooms in Australia as it ever was...
- iso1631 6y ago
  In Ye Olde Dayes it referred to someone who had control or authority over a place, object, craft, etc -- a teacher would be a master for example. It's a common word across European languages, and certainly predated the atlantic slave trade. Probably descended from the Latin word "magister", which (despite Rome having plenty of slaves) didn't neccersarilly refer to a slaveowner -- indeed many Roman slaves were Ludi Magister -- educated slaves that were teachers at Roman schools Etymology of "master bedroom" seems to come from "Master's bedroom" in boarding schools, where it was the bedroom that the school master occupied (with Master having descended from Roman times)
SkyMarshal 6y ago
That’s my impression too. “Slave” should be replaced with some other more neutral term, but “master” shouldn’t be a problem. There are multiple uses of it in different contexts, but the shared implication is of a definitive source: Master copy; Remastered (music); Master of Arts/Sciences; Mastery Etc. None of that implies a master-slave relationship.
- Telemakhos 6y ago
  The English word “master” comes from the Latin “magister,” which is freighted with thousands of years of meanings and history. The meaning of slaveowner was not one of those meanings until probably the seventeenth or eighteenth century. In Latin, “magister,” never meant the master of slaves (a “herus” most properly, or a “dominus,” an owner of anything with legal title to that thing). Instead, the “magister” was a leader of a group: the “magister equitum” was a cavalry commander, and a “ludi magister” a schoolmaster or classroom teacher. It is from the latter that we have “master” in the sense of an MA (magister artium) degree, which, like the PhD, was originally a teaching license. The use of the English “master” to refer to slavery is comparatively recent and might well not predate the eighteenth century.
  - kgwgk 6y ago
    On the other hand, “family” comes from Latin “familia” (household servants) from “famulus” (servant).
- tigerlily 6y ago
  Why not use gimp for slave? Master and gimp. Edit: No! You see Ivan, it should be master and margarita!
- stephen_g 6y ago
  I'd be really interested to hear from any black people here - does the idea of having a device or piece of software being called a 'slave' really actually offend anybody? I'd never subconsciously linked the term with human slaves, only ever really thinking of it as an abstract concept, until people started complaining about it... Part of it may be coming from a different cultural context, not being from the US though...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
derpthebert 6y ago
let's ban all words.
tomtomtom777 6y ago
> I would agree "slave" seems a weird choice of a word Can you clarify this? If one machine/repo/system acts only on the orders of another, wouldn't "master" and "slave" be clear, descriptive choices of words?
- elsjaako 6y ago
  Let's say you had a database based application and a feature to remove a subset of records. You wouldn't call that feature any variant of "ethnic clensing", "genocide" or "Holocaust", no matter how descriptive those terms were for your specific function. Slavery was really bad, and for that reason shouln't be used as a description. There are always alternatives, like "leader and follower"
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - xupybd 6y ago
    We use terms like demon, basically a personification of evil.
    - XorNot 6y ago
      And we'll stop in the event of the demonic invasion of Earth, but Doom 2 remains just a video game.
    - kgwgk 6y ago
      The origin of the term is not so evil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)#Etymology
      - dijit 6y ago
        But we don't seem to care about origins of words, Master itself didn't mean slave owner until late in the 17th century.
    - 6y ago
INTPenis 6y ago
Same here, until this debate surfaced I never thought about slavery when I saw these terms. What made me think more about slavery was the materials that go into computers like cobalt and sulfur. Someone has to go down into the sulfur mine and get that for us. That's an actual master/slave relationship that is going on right now to power all our fantastic infrastructure. But so much industry has depended on sulfur for so many years that this debate is much deeper and more complex. The ugly truth is that someone far away has to be enslaved for us to live comfortably. Bring that debate to the front instead and we might find a technical solution to it. But it's always cheaper to find a desperate person than to maintain a robot that is being attacked by gas and sulfur daily.
- Brian_K_White 6y ago
  And now I am imagining some video where they go down into sulfur mine and tell one of the miners "We bring great news for you! Github changed the default name of master code branches to something else! Gitlab too! It was kind of a little bit annoying a little but they're doing it anyway!"
  - XorNot 6y ago
    Yeah and just think, then we could also tell those people about how a wrongly accused man in not their country was released after charitable efforts to clear his name, in the process overturning a negligent evidence handling process which will make things much better going forwards! And...it still wouldn't matter to those people at all because it wouldn't change their specific situation! This is a pretty insipid argument.
    - Brian_K_White 6y ago
      There was no argument. It was an image. But the parent argument is valid, you just somehow missed it despite it being descibed and illustrated. github's action isn't absurd because it doesn't change any random person's situation. It's absurd because of the specific people whose specific situations are not improved.
himinlomax 6y ago
Note how master is not even the main term used to describe people who had slaves. The term typically used is owner, as in "so and so was a slaveowner." A Marxist would chuckle at the notion that Microsoft would be removing the word "owner" for being offensive.
- foobar33333 6y ago
  Both gitlab and github make heavy use of the term owner and ownership. Someone should let them know they have more renaming to do.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  The word "master" when applied to slavery is itself a euphemism for owner, which is the truly abhorrent type of interpersonal relationship.
Roark66 6y ago
>I would agree "slave" seems a weird choice of a word I disagree, however I'm not a native English speaker. It is the most descriptive single word describing this mode of working. We can't ban master/slave as a word or we will loose understanding of what it means. Another poster already mentioned that there are actual human slaves in existence today. I once heard in our time there are more human slaves than ever (mostly due to there being more people overall). It is sad that large companies like Microsoft(Github) choose to waste energy on such pointless activities instead of actually doing something about modern slavery. Microsoft is still in unique position of being able to pressure hardware makers. Why don't they pressure them into at least trying to improve conditions of actual slaves that mine cobalt and other rare materials at the bottom of their supply chain?
- eythian 6y ago
  > It is the most descriptive single word describing this mode of working. It often isn't. It's not uncommon that "replica" or "secondary" actually make more sense.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    I’ve also seen leader, follower in use.
  - junon 6y ago
    Replica means replicated data, usually a copy. Secondary means backup or parity module. Slave means neither of those things. A slave, in technical terms, means a "dumb" worker (meaning it doesn't make its own decisions about how it operates within the greater system) that is controlled by another module in the system (often called a "master"). And no, "worker" isn't descriptive because it doesn't specify the nature of autonomy within the system - oftentimes, a worker might autonomously pick tasks off a queue and perform work offline or something. A slave is directly, actively and imperatively given commands by another entity in the system. Further, it is also implied that a slave has a lifetime that spans within the lifetime of the master. Workers, replicas, or secondaries do not share this trait. "Slave" is the only word that accurately infers the technical operating aspects of such an actor within system's design. Stop messing with our vocabulary please. We need it to do real work. Bring on the downvotes, because I know the performative woke crowd loves to ignore these facts.
llimos 6y ago
And MasterCard. Everyone must switch to Visa now.
leg100 6y ago
Once you agree that one word is apt for removal then you agree with the agenda that the article author roundly rejects. By going down the road of agreeing to some words to be removed you're then imposing a presumption of guilt on anyone who refuses to remove said words. If I maintain some software that uses the word slave or blacklist and I don't accede to making the changes to remove it, or agree to approve a PR that does the same, then it's presumed I am stubborn or worse still, racist. Despite the usage of the word being completely innocent. Of course, context is everything, which only proves the point. You cannot systematically ban certain words.
tim44 6y ago
With the NBA right now, there is debate about teams having "owners."
willis936 6y ago
The important thing to know here is that it is not how you interpret the words that matter. Social justice isn’t asking how github or existing developers feel because it isn’t a change that takes their feelings into account. I’m playing devil’s advocate. I don’t have strong feelings on this specific change, but I can see my line of thinking surprisingly absent in this entire thread.

PurpleFoxy 6y ago

Master bedroom, master record, master copy. The word master is just a synonym for main.

lanternfish 6y ago
It should be noted that of all of the ways master is used in this thread, master bedroom is pretty high up there in bad history and connotation. The etymology derives from the 'master of the house', a term which historically served to diminish the agency of wives, servants, and slaves. I don't know about master/main, but I could definitely get behind renaming master bedrooms.
nayaketo 6y ago
Company I'm currently working for deals with real estate drawings. We were notified recently that we're changing "Master bedroom" to "Main bedroom" too.
roel_v 6y ago
'Master bedroom' is going out of real estate descriptions, being replaced by 'main bedroom'. E.g. https://www.housebeautiful.com/lifestyle/fun-at-home/a1087/master-bedroom-politically-incorrect/ https://www.housebeautiful.com/lifestyle/fun-at-home/a1087/m... but that's just the first google hit, there's plenty out there. In Dutch (both in .nl and .be), the English term 'master bedroom' was fashionable for a few years, until the stigma of that term carried over from the Anglosphere and it's now being replaced (in the woke areas of the country) with 'ouderslaapkamer', which is literally translated 'parent bedroom'. Although now that term itself is 'controversial' (not mainstream controversial, more in small hardcore circles, so I'm not sure if this will actually become an issue) because (to the best of my understanding of this objection) 'parent bedroom' implies that the 2-parents-with-children family form is normative (you can't make this up if you tried to), which it shouldn't be. Not sure what my point is, maybe that using 'master' for 'main' is no longer outright commonly accepted usage?
- jlokier 6y ago
  About 'parent bedroom', a lot of houses are occupied by house-sharers these days. Some sharers get the 'parent bedroom', others get the non-parent bedroom but they are all the same age. It makes some sense to change the description.
  - roel_v 6y ago
    That's a utilitarian argument (I think?) that I could get behind (not that anyone asks for my opinion on what rooms should be called). From that POV I guess it would be best to just call any room that isn't a kitchen or bathroom just 'room' and let buyers decide. But then again, most people don't have much imagination and like to be shown how space can or is intended to be used, much like how a neatly decorated house sells easier than an empty or cluttered one. But the objections I read about last summer (tried looking but I can't find it any more) were moral, that the term is also 'oppressive' (not sure if that's the actual term they used, that was the gist of it), basically the same arguments that are made for removing 'master' from Git, language frames our thinking etc.
- plett 6y ago
  In the UK, lots of real estate descriptions side-step the problem completely and use terms like 'Bedroom 1' for the largest bedroom and 'Bedroom 2' etc for the 2nd largest.
- stephen_g 6y ago
  I'd never heard of any stigma around the word 'master' until today... It's still as commonly used to refer to master bedrooms in Australia as it ever was...
iso1631 6y ago
In Ye Olde Dayes it referred to someone who had control or authority over a place, object, craft, etc -- a teacher would be a master for example. It's a common word across European languages, and certainly predated the atlantic slave trade. Probably descended from the Latin word "magister", which (despite Rome having plenty of slaves) didn't neccersarilly refer to a slaveowner -- indeed many Roman slaves were Ludi Magister -- educated slaves that were teachers at Roman schools Etymology of "master bedroom" seems to come from "Master's bedroom" in boarding schools, where it was the bedroom that the school master occupied (with Master having descended from Roman times)

SkyMarshal 6y ago

That’s my impression too. “Slave” should be replaced with some other more neutral term, but “master” shouldn’t be a problem. There are multiple uses of it in different contexts, but the shared implication is of a definitive source: Master copy; Remastered (music); Master of Arts/Sciences; Mastery Etc. None of that implies a master-slave relationship.

Telemakhos 6y ago
The English word “master” comes from the Latin “magister,” which is freighted with thousands of years of meanings and history. The meaning of slaveowner was not one of those meanings until probably the seventeenth or eighteenth century. In Latin, “magister,” never meant the master of slaves (a “herus” most properly, or a “dominus,” an owner of anything with legal title to that thing). Instead, the “magister” was a leader of a group: the “magister equitum” was a cavalry commander, and a “ludi magister” a schoolmaster or classroom teacher. It is from the latter that we have “master” in the sense of an MA (magister artium) degree, which, like the PhD, was originally a teaching license. The use of the English “master” to refer to slavery is comparatively recent and might well not predate the eighteenth century.
- kgwgk 6y ago
  On the other hand, “family” comes from Latin “familia” (household servants) from “famulus” (servant).
tigerlily 6y ago
Why not use gimp for slave? Master and gimp. Edit: No! You see Ivan, it should be master and margarita!
stephen_g 6y ago
I'd be really interested to hear from any black people here - does the idea of having a device or piece of software being called a 'slave' really actually offend anybody? I'd never subconsciously linked the term with human slaves, only ever really thinking of it as an abstract concept, until people started complaining about it... Part of it may be coming from a different cultural context, not being from the US though...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

derpthebert 6y ago

let's ban all words.

tomtomtom777 6y ago

> I would agree "slave" seems a weird choice of a word Can you clarify this? If one machine/repo/system acts only on the orders of another, wouldn't "master" and "slave" be clear, descriptive choices of words?

elsjaako 6y ago
Let's say you had a database based application and a feature to remove a subset of records. You wouldn't call that feature any variant of "ethnic clensing", "genocide" or "Holocaust", no matter how descriptive those terms were for your specific function. Slavery was really bad, and for that reason shouln't be used as a description. There are always alternatives, like "leader and follower"
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- xupybd 6y ago
  We use terms like demon, basically a personification of evil.
  - XorNot 6y ago
    And we'll stop in the event of the demonic invasion of Earth, but Doom 2 remains just a video game.
  - kgwgk 6y ago
    The origin of the term is not so evil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)#Etymology
    - dijit 6y ago
      But we don't seem to care about origins of words, Master itself didn't mean slave owner until late in the 17th century.
  - 6y ago

INTPenis 6y ago

Same here, until this debate surfaced I never thought about slavery when I saw these terms. What made me think more about slavery was the materials that go into computers like cobalt and sulfur. Someone has to go down into the sulfur mine and get that for us. That's an actual master/slave relationship that is going on right now to power all our fantastic infrastructure. But so much industry has depended on sulfur for so many years that this debate is much deeper and more complex. The ugly truth is that someone far away has to be enslaved for us to live comfortably. Bring that debate to the front instead and we might find a technical solution to it. But it's always cheaper to find a desperate person than to maintain a robot that is being attacked by gas and sulfur daily.

Brian_K_White 6y ago
And now I am imagining some video where they go down into sulfur mine and tell one of the miners "We bring great news for you! Github changed the default name of master code branches to something else! Gitlab too! It was kind of a little bit annoying a little but they're doing it anyway!"
- XorNot 6y ago
  Yeah and just think, then we could also tell those people about how a wrongly accused man in not their country was released after charitable efforts to clear his name, in the process overturning a negligent evidence handling process which will make things much better going forwards! And...it still wouldn't matter to those people at all because it wouldn't change their specific situation! This is a pretty insipid argument.
  - Brian_K_White 6y ago
    There was no argument. It was an image. But the parent argument is valid, you just somehow missed it despite it being descibed and illustrated. github's action isn't absurd because it doesn't change any random person's situation. It's absurd because of the specific people whose specific situations are not improved.

himinlomax 6y ago

Note how master is not even the main term used to describe people who had slaves. The term typically used is owner, as in "so and so was a slaveowner." A Marxist would chuckle at the notion that Microsoft would be removing the word "owner" for being offensive.

foobar33333 6y ago
Both gitlab and github make heavy use of the term owner and ownership. Someone should let them know they have more renaming to do.
globular-toast 6y ago
The word "master" when applied to slavery is itself a euphemism for owner, which is the truly abhorrent type of interpersonal relationship.

Roark66 6y ago

>I would agree "slave" seems a weird choice of a word I disagree, however I'm not a native English speaker. It is the most descriptive single word describing this mode of working. We can't ban master/slave as a word or we will loose understanding of what it means. Another poster already mentioned that there are actual human slaves in existence today. I once heard in our time there are more human slaves than ever (mostly due to there being more people overall). It is sad that large companies like Microsoft(Github) choose to waste energy on such pointless activities instead of actually doing something about modern slavery. Microsoft is still in unique position of being able to pressure hardware makers. Why don't they pressure them into at least trying to improve conditions of actual slaves that mine cobalt and other rare materials at the bottom of their supply chain?

eythian 6y ago
> It is the most descriptive single word describing this mode of working. It often isn't. It's not uncommon that "replica" or "secondary" actually make more sense.
- Spivak 6y ago
  I’ve also seen leader, follower in use.
- junon 6y ago
  Replica means replicated data, usually a copy. Secondary means backup or parity module. Slave means neither of those things. A slave, in technical terms, means a "dumb" worker (meaning it doesn't make its own decisions about how it operates within the greater system) that is controlled by another module in the system (often called a "master"). And no, "worker" isn't descriptive because it doesn't specify the nature of autonomy within the system - oftentimes, a worker might autonomously pick tasks off a queue and perform work offline or something. A slave is directly, actively and imperatively given commands by another entity in the system. Further, it is also implied that a slave has a lifetime that spans within the lifetime of the master. Workers, replicas, or secondaries do not share this trait. "Slave" is the only word that accurately infers the technical operating aspects of such an actor within system's design. Stop messing with our vocabulary please. We need it to do real work. Bring on the downvotes, because I know the performative woke crowd loves to ignore these facts.

llimos 6y ago

And MasterCard. Everyone must switch to Visa now.

leg100 6y ago

Once you agree that one word is apt for removal then you agree with the agenda that the article author roundly rejects. By going down the road of agreeing to some words to be removed you're then imposing a presumption of guilt on anyone who refuses to remove said words. If I maintain some software that uses the word slave or blacklist and I don't accede to making the changes to remove it, or agree to approve a PR that does the same, then it's presumed I am stubborn or worse still, racist. Despite the usage of the word being completely innocent. Of course, context is everything, which only proves the point. You cannot systematically ban certain words.

tim44 6y ago

With the NBA right now, there is debate about teams having "owners."

willis936 6y ago

The important thing to know here is that it is not how you interpret the words that matter. Social justice isn’t asking how github or existing developers feel because it isn’t a change that takes their feelings into account. I’m playing devil’s advocate. I don’t have strong feelings on this specific change, but I can see my line of thinking surprisingly absent in this entire thread.