45 ms·

Word usage guidance and alternative terms

168 points by PurpleFoxy 5y ago

randomcarbloke 5y ago
it fails even a generous coherence check.
bendbro 5y ago
I always open emails from Google recruiters to trigger the tracking pixel and then am sure to not respond.
JackPoach 5y ago
Some recommendations are, well, weird.
traveler01 5y ago
What a waste of time...
zylanx 5y ago
Hmm. Some highlights. So you can't say a process has "hung" or "hanged". You can't say you've "killed" a process. Can't say "Sanity check". That isn't allowed. Can't even say "Sane". Can't use "Dummy variable". Can't say "Manpower", "Manned", "Manmade". You also can't use "Male/Female Adapter". Can't say "Dumb down".
- zylanx 5y ago
  So you also can't say "First class". Guess that rules out "First class concept"
  - js8 5y ago
    You can't say it, but you can fly it? :-)
- jrek 5y ago
  To be far these restrictions operate in a fairly narrow domain (Developer documentation) where some restrictions on idiomatic usage are probably warranted to maximise the number of people that can fully comprehend the docs (for example not all languages refer to adapters as 'male' or 'female' and the meaning may not be obvious to a non native speaker.) Secondly, "This guide contains guidelines, not rules. Depart from it when doing so improves your content."
  - f6v 5y ago
    > the meaning may not be obvious to a non native speaker In Russian you’d say “mom-dad” adapter. I mean, the principle it refers to is universal. I also think this is the first step towards aggressively policing the language, even though it starts as a guideline.
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      > I also think this is the first step towards aggressively policing the language, even though it starts as a guideline. Language changes over time, as easy as that. Sometimes change comes in gradually over decades or centuries, sometimes change comes revolutionary (e.g. rap music lingo establishing itself in mainstream culture). Especially in the example case of music, "policing" has been a constant reality (e.g. "bleeping out" of words or outright refusal to air content on TV/radio or parents forbidding their children to listen to rap or metal music because of "satanism" fears), yet no one complained there while now there is constant complaining about replacing of actually racially charged words?!
      - f6v 5y ago
        > yet no one complained I constantly complain about Eminem’s music videos cutting the words out. > replacing actually racially charged words You said it yourself, language changes. Just don’t charge the words, simple as that. Words are sound waves, or pixels on the screen. And it’s people who give them meaning. It seems to me that the ideas behind the words won’t get anywhere if you just ban words.
      - 5y ago
- 0xy 5y ago
  This kind of assault on language is really hostile to newcomers. Open docs, Ctrl + F for "blacklist" to figure out how to quickly stop a nefarious user, can't find it, look somewhere else. How much economic damage will it cause to deliberately muddy the waters of terminology?
  - busymom0 5y ago
    Not sure why you are getting downvoted. You make a very valid point and this type of political correctness nonsense will get some people get in some dangerous situations. It's like I am living in the twilight zone.
    - chalst 5y ago
      Not all PC is nonsense. Language is indeed sometimes used as a weapon, and disadvantaged groups are often the least able to defend themselves. Asserting that all PC is nonsense is just the kind of violation of the curious-not-dogmatic ethos that prevails here that will attract downvotes. If you have difficulties understanding why some might consider the GP post on the edge, you maybe don't understand this culture and should perhaps spend some time reading dang's moderation comments.
- busymom0 5y ago
  Terms like man-in-the-middle, master-slave, whitelist/blacklist, abort which I barely learned 5 years ago in University are now being cancelled. Even first-class isn't to be used according to Google. But "premium, or platinum-level" is okay. I guess the people making these political decisions must be elites with "premium platinum level" control over Google. If this wasn't HN, I would have posted some super obscene comment on how absolutely "slowed, invalid and insensible" some of these political ones are. Are we going to change traffic lights from yellow and red to something else too now? How long before terminal commands need to be renamed from kill, man, fat32 to something else?
  - stevehawk 5y ago
    We'll change traffic light colors if some white people with Ph.D.s in Silicon Valley decide they're racist and need do their daily virtue signalling so they can pat themselves on the back and say "we did it! we fixed racism!".
- mahoho 5y ago
  > Male/Female Adapter I dunno. I don't care about any of the other terms, but describing plugs and receptacles in terms of penetrative heterosexual intercourse has always made me a little uncomfortable.
  - terom 5y ago
    I will never forget the embarrassment of visiting the electronics store as a kid, and naively asking for a DB-9 sex changer :D
  - jobigoud 5y ago
    It's the perfect analogy. Most people will understand it without an explanation.
    - bhandziuk 5y ago
      It's great too because it has no bias.
foxes 5y ago
Most of these are perfectly reasonable, a lot to do with helping clarity of writing. Abbreviations definitely do not help clarity and should be avoided. Colloquialisms also do not help clarity if it is meant to be understood by a large audience (international even). As for the ones that hacker news by and large seems to think are controversial, I agree with the style guide, there are only historical arguments for keeping gendered/race based language. Why not remove it. Language is dynamic, it can evolve.
- hnaccy 5y ago
  Blacklist and similar are not race based.
  - btgeekboy 5y ago
    The point is to remove the positive connotation for "white" and negative for "black." Nobody's implying your blacklist-turned-blocklist has anything to do with race.
    - LudwigNagasena 5y ago
      It feels like it would be easier to stop calling people black and white rather than purge all light-based metaphors from the language.
      - goto11 5y ago
        How would Google make the rest of the English-speaking world change their use of these words?
        f6v 5y ago
        Maybe it shouldn’t even try? I mean, since when is an internet ad company qualified to tell me what language to use?
        5y ago
vmception 5y ago
I appreciate how they are using their platform, it is an option and they are choosing that option. It would be nice if their IDE linter would help this along though, compliance would be tricky for developers.
2rsf 5y ago
Mostly logical and makes sense, BUT how is one supposed to go over all those? is there lint tool to check documentations?
- itsyaboi 5y ago
  Of course! Many person-hours will be spent on inclusive language tooling and services that will carefully keep track of your word offenses, with automated reminders of any infractions!
  - 6sup6 5y ago
    Don't give them ideas, please.
    - itsyaboi 5y ago
      My comment was not tongue in cheek. This is already happening at FAANG.
      - erik_seaberg 5y ago
        I have actually seen a linter complain about “mastercard” in a JSON commit. In payment processing, we don’t get to change that.
nfrankel 5y ago
The biggest issue I see in this list is that it compounds multiple concerns: grammar, Google and socio-political (or however you choose to call it). While it makes a lot of sense for Google, I have no reason to use it if I'm not a Googler (and even then).
- ali_m 5y ago
  I think the goal is to provide practical guidance to developers. Splitting it into N different lists seems strictly worse in this regard.
  - josteink 5y ago
    > Splitting it into N different lists seems strictly worse in this regard. Not at all. If I could find three lists: - common imprecise language used by developers, and how to improve it. - common grammar errors among developers. - San Fransisco deep-left political preferences wrt to code documentation. I would know which two which would be of use to me, and which one I should absolutely ignore.
    - ali_m 5y ago
      Well, it's a policy document for Google developers, who presumably aren't free to just pick and choose which rules to follow. I personally agree with ~95% of the list, and the other 5% seems too trivial to be worth arguing over. I couldn't care less about the motivation behind the rules (political or otherwise) as long as they don't sacrifice clarity, and I think that's basically true for everything in here.
baxuz 5y ago
- AM, PM To be consistent with Material Design, use all-caps, no periods, and a space before. Recommended: 9:00 AM I'm gonna be snarky and say to just use 24h time in developer documentation. - APIs; not API's This isn't a style decision. It's basic grammar - authN, authZ Don't use. Instead, use authentication or authorization. But i18n and a11y is fine it seems? -manmade, man made Avoid using gendered terms. Instead use a word like artificial, manufactured, or synthetic. "Man" refers to a person, or specifically an individual of the human species in this context. -master Use with caution. Never use in conjunction with slave. Finally, a rational decision.
- hef19898 5y ago
  How dare you? What's next, the metric system?
  - azalemeth 5y ago
    One thing that particularly annoyed me about their en-gb vs en-us spelling example was "tonne" vs "ton". They are different! I do wonder if America will _ever_ make the switch to the metric system. The French managed it in 1799; backwards Britain had mostly managed it by 1972; and yet working with US engineers means that I occasionally find myself converting units like slugs or "circular mils" into SI units for FEM modelling. Wolfram alpha is a godsend. I just really, really hate the US unit system with a passion!
    - ghaff 5y ago
      As someone who is pretty indifferent about metric and US customary units on a day to day basis, the one area as a onetime mechanical engineer I think is pretty annoying is US mass/force units in engineering calculations.
    - nerdkid93 5y ago
      Technically, America is metric in that our units are based on metric units now. So 1 yard is defined as 0.9144 meter and 1 pound (avoirdupois) is 0.45359237 kg[0]. 0: https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/PUBS_LIB/FedRegister/FRdoc59-5442.pdf https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/PUBS_LIB/FedRegister/FRdoc59-5442.p...
shp0ngle 5y ago
One would say, it's a word blacklist.... ...oh.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
imgabe 5y ago
A better title would be Google Developer Style Guide, as most of these are just suggestions to be more precise and standardize names for things. For the bits that want to be culture war flashpoints, I mean yeah, it’s dumb, but I’m just so tired of this. Can we just put all the speech police in a corner so they can argue with each other about the most perfectly inoffensive way to say things while everyone else does real work?
thinkingemote 5y ago
I found the removal of verbs for certain obviously contentious words interesting. It's not possible to say "this was denylisted" for example.
- btgeekboy 5y ago
  "This was denylisted" works perfectly fine. It's no different grammatically from "This was blacklisted;" the only difference is you aren't used to it yet.
  - LudwigNagasena 5y ago
    “Black” is an adjective and “deny” is a verb, so the compound words derived from them may work differently.
  - alacombe 5y ago
    Isn't the whole concept behind "denylisting" introducing harmful remainder of segregation and discrimination ?
  - hardlianotion 5y ago
    Denylisted looks like it was assembled by committee.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  It's just not recommended. And it's just because saying what adding something to the list does is more precise than saying black list or deny list.
- Pfhreak 5y ago
  Denylist contains the verb you are looking for, the phrase would be, "This was denied." That's the point of the change -- it's clearer about what happened.
ramblerman 5y ago
I see the benefit of standardizing some language across documentation, but I feel a lot of politically charged items were also taken out which ironically make some things harder to understand, as they are just so commonplace. > fat client : don't use fat > the process is hanging : don't use hang/hung > dummy variable : don't use dumb > we treat this client as a first-class citizen : don't use first-class citizen > DMZ : use a more precise term like perimeter network. > DLQ : use unprocessed messages queue > whitelist/blacklist : use deny list or allow list > blackbox : use opaque-box > sanity check : use coherence check > kebab case : use dash case
- kabes 5y ago
  What's the problem with using a word like fat in a way that has no negative connotation (as in fat client)?
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    Same as "sanity check". It seems people with severe anxiety or similar issues prefer to change their surrounding environment to not be reminded of their possible perceived shortcomings instead of getting professional help. It's sad that this happens in the first place, but also in the same breath as change proposals in the name of fighting racism and other discrimination. I don't want to sound insensitive, but people who struggle with encountering terms like "fat" or "sanity" in their everyday life could achieve a significantly better quality of life by improving themselves. I know that from first-hand experience and from professionals who actually have patients with fear of flying and all kinds of other ailments, and I think being so accomodating actually hurts the affected people more in the long term than it helps.
    - objectivetruth 5y ago
      If making an innocuous and minor change to your vocabulary to help a colleague bothers you so much, maybe it's you that needs the professional help. (Your implied "solution" of "all people with severe anxiety should just get professional help to solve it" incorrectly presumes that professional help always solves that problem AND greatly over-estimates the number of people that have access to said professional help.) That's just me, though. I'm already an oddity on HN because I don't care if an employer fires people for saying racist things nor do I care if a social media company chooses to end its professional relationship with a user that posts anti-vax nonsense.
Zealotux 5y ago
Working in a GAFAM these days sounds like working in a minefield.
- andrew_v4 5y ago
  Yeah, this is an underrated comment. I mean the origin of some of this stuff is to be inclusive and diverse, but ironically it has the effect of making people walk on eggshells all the time and not feel like they can act normally. It's like that scene in x-men (x-people now?) first class when magneto tells mystique that if she's using half her energy to be someone else all the time, she'll never be at her full potential. If you're constantly screening your code, writing, and speech for increasingly obscure ways that people could get offended, you're not working at your full potential.
- 6sup6 5y ago
  I can confirm that. And I feel it everyday.
tsujp 5y ago
"The term man (from Proto-Germanic *mann- "person") and words derived from it can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their sex or age." [1] As with most things Google does this will set some kind of precedent that a non-trivial subset may follow on with. Where does this stop though? Human -> Huperson? What do we rename the `kill` command to? How will that affect scripts that use it? The result of that is to then have a shim to `kill` anyway so the net result is a tonne of stuff breaks and `kill` is still present? I'm all for improving our use of language but a lot of these kinds of changes are virtue signals that don't enact any meaningful change at all [2][3]. There are lots of words taken out of context purposefully for instance, "my process is hung" has nothing to do with hanging of human beings. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_(word) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_(word) [2] https://mooseyanon.medium.com/github-f-ck-your-name-change-de599033bbbe https://mooseyanon.medium.com/github-f-ck-your-name-change-d... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26487854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26487854
- adrian17 5y ago
  Similarly: > guys, you guys: When referring to a group of people use non-gendered language, such as everyone or folks. Isn't the plural form "guys" already explicitly inclusive?
  - bbarnett 5y ago
    Some of this is so colloquial. Where I live, 'guys' is even used by women, when speaking to a group of other women. People assuming how they use language, is right, assumes that there is one language, eg, one english, not many. Very 'centre of the universe' thinking.
    - kevincox 5y ago
      While this is true isn't it helpful to make people feel included. I grew up in Toronto, Canada where "guys" was widely used as a gender-neutral term in most contexts (admittedly there are some phrases where a gender is heavily implied). However when I was working at a tech company in Dublin, Ireland I noticed that if I addressed a room with "guys" women in the room would often feel excluded. This is not unreasonable given the different dialects and the minority of women in this setting. So sure, we could say that she is wrong for feeling excluded but when many minorities already feel excluded it seems wrong to use language that reaffirms that nagging feeling constantly whispering to them from the back of their mind. And avoiding the term "guys" is a simple case even though "Y'all" and "folks" sound really odd to me, I agree that there is a huge spectrum here and the line of what is reasonable and what isn't is incredibly fuzzy.
Traubenfuchs 5y ago
Do Googlers read this nanny guide? Do they follow it? Does anyone complain if they don't?
- PurpleFoxy 5y ago
  I got linked this list from a googler who was tired of wasting brain cycles on working out how to word comments in allowed ways.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  > Does anyone complain if they don't? There will most definitely be some useless people in there that don't have anything better to do than police this in the name of "diversity and inclusion" so yes.
- 6sup6 5y ago
  Im aware of a few words but I don't read the guide. It is (almost) literally a minefield to work with these people. I'm here just for the green card and the huge bonus I'm getting. If you can, avoid this company.
DrBazza 5y ago
I see the US tech industry is trying to export its weird culture wars to the rest of the world.
slver 5y ago
It's a good list, mostly. It's just nearly impossible to memorize. I also think sometimes about terms like whitelist and blacklist. The problem isn't that they refer to race. The problem is that "white" and "black" refer to race. White and black are basic colors, and assigning meaning to colors is natural and unavoidable. However "white people" aren't "white", and "black people" aren't "black". So IMHO the focus should be on dropping racial connotations from colors. If we're fine with not calling Asians "yellow" and Native Americans "red", we should be fine with that too. Imagine if we couldn't have yellow and red traffic lights, because it'd be offensive to a race.
- codefined 5y ago
  Sometimes avoiding those connotations are exceptionally hard, verging on impossible. In comparison, it seems a documentation change from whitelist to allowlist might just be a single find & replace away for a project.
  - thefz 5y ago
    > Sometimes avoiding those connotations are exceptionally hard That is 100% an anglo-saxon world problem since most European languages either differentiate between words for skin color and color name, or using the color name to describe skin color isn't considered racist at all. I would stretch it even to mark it as an US-only problem.
    - falcolas 5y ago
      Instead, European languages have a tendency to gender everything. I imagine that’s an untapped “problem” in some folks’ eyes that will boil over sooner or later.
      - anon98356 5y ago
        I was recently in France and was told by a local this was actually an issue with the covid outbreak. There is a department that decides on the gender of new words and they determined covid (or some variant on that) to be feminine.
tester34 5y ago
>smartphone >Don't use. Instead, use mobile phone or phone. weird
omega3 5y ago
Some of them are baffling. regex - Don't use. Instead, use regular expression
- BlueParanoia 5y ago
  This is a style guide, not a word blacklist. They suggest not using regex because it's not as clear, especially to thought who never learned what regex is, as regular expression.
  - josteink 5y ago
    > This is a style guide, not a word blacklist. You're not allowed to say that :D
  - omega3 5y ago
    I think the reverse is actually true, more people know what regex is than what it stands for (especially if their first language isn't English). https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=regex,regular%20expressions https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=regex,regu...
    - kevincox 5y ago
      Exactly. Some acronyms are more commonly known than their "expanded" form making the former the better name to use. For example I don't see many people spelling out Hyper-Text Transport Protocol.
  - blackshaw 5y ago
    How could anyone with more than 5 minutes experience as a software developer possibly not know what a "regex" is?
- nickysielicki 5y ago
  This is further complicated by the fact that “regular expression” typically refers to the more academic form of regular expressions (eg: regular languages), whereas “regex” tends to refer to the extended PCRE-style regexs with various non-regular features.
WalterBright 5y ago
My style guide is simpler. You should not use "you" in technical documentation. You can just search for "you" and you can delete them, and you will see that the text becomes better.
- Angostura 5y ago
  Should not use "" in technical documentation. can just just search for "" and can delete them, and will see that the text becomes better.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Lookin' good!
    - yesenadam 5y ago
      Hahaha :D – so funny. Thank you Walter, I needed that laugh.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
nickysielicki 5y ago
> man-in-the-middle (MITM) Avoid using gendered terms. Instead use terms like on-path attacker, person-in-the-middle (PITM). This one got me. You can’t just replace “MITM” with “PITM” and expect anyone to know what you’re talking about. I know what MITM means. I have no idea what PITM means at first glance. I suspect that nobody does. So my main question is, who wrote that? Because I can’t imagine any technical person seriously suggesting that replacement.
- domenukk 5y ago
  Machine in the Middle or Malice in the Middle are better options imho
- polar 5y ago
  Pain In The M?
- bennyp101 5y ago
  Seems that it was a Google VP? https://twitter.com/daveksecure/status/1279194357116006400?lang=en https://twitter.com/daveksecure/status/1279194357116006400?l... But yea, changing terms like that is not very helpful, unless everyone is onboard
  - dustinmoris 5y ago
    The funny thing is that his own name is not even gender neutral: "Kleidermacher" means Clothes maker, but it's the male version of it. The female version would be "Kleidermacherin". It's interesting because if he has a wife then his own wife has a male version of the last name. Interestingly in Polish we always had gender versioned names. My name is Gorski, which is the male version for "Man from the mountains", but my mum and sister are "Gorska" which means "Women from the mountain". It was always like this. My grandpa was Gorski and my grandma was Gorska. This does not exist in German, there is no "Kleidermacherin" as a last name. Just wanted to point this out as an interesting thing I noticed.
    - b3tta 5y ago
bennyp101 5y ago
Aside from the obvious ones, whose debate is polarized, there are some that would actually make things harder to understand (especially if one didn't know this list existed) I assume this is for writing documentation/code for Google products, so if internal only, then I guess everyone is on-board and would get used to it. If it is for external consumption as well, then it potentially just make things harder to grok. A "full-featured client" is not the same as a "fat client" to me. "opaque-box" when reading would make me stop, think 'oh, do I need to look that up?' then realise it just means that it is blackbox and I should just not bother with it. Reminds me of those people who like to use much longer and fancy words for something that does not need it.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > If it is for external consumption as well, then it potentially just make things harder to grok. On the other side, what megacorps such as Google or Facebook adopt influences everyone else. While some of the terms on this list tend to be a bit nit-picky, it's not a bad thing to replace stuff such as master/slave or blacklist/whitelist... and having big-name influencers commit to that is a huge step forward. From a political view: ideally this whole debate should have been done in the open, in democratic discourse, but unfortunately Congress has been gridlocked for the most part of the last decades, and mass media these days more serves to outrage and click-baiting (for the sake of ad money) instead of hosting civilized debate.
  - bennyp101 5y ago
    I have zero problem with "master/slave or blacklist/whitelist.." stuff, I just didn't mention it because everyone has their own view, and had been discussed to the nth. "megacorps such as Google or Facebook adopt influences everyone else" I don't really agree with this, they try and push their own agenda, but ultimately the community decides what it wants to do
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    You think Congress should compel using certain terms?
JPDSm8NTaAYBHd 5y ago
I add whitelist/blacklist to every codebase to offset this leftism.
znpy 5y ago
>> ninja > Don't use to refer to a person. Instead, use a term such as expert. OK to use in reference to companies, tools, software packages, and other entities that use the term in their names. I guess? >> OK or okay; not ok or Okay Now that's borderline silly ?
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >> OK or okay; not ok or Okay that's a style rule, many of these other rules are social rules. It is silly to mix the two. on edit: just to note I was agreeing with you it's a silly rule, but it is silly in the context that they have all these social and moral requirements and then they blithely mix in something that is at a different level of concern. I feel these guidelines were written by a Junior Dev on the English Language project.
- gnoll_of_gozag 5y ago
  what if i say okey
- bhandziuk 5y ago
  I'm ok with this "ninja" language not being used. It's the same as "guru". Who ever says those works usually sounds like they don't know what they are talking about.
intricatedetail 5y ago
What a minefield. It's good to learn that list for use in real life to, so that you don't get cancelled. I am waiting for a list of what you are allowed to think and boilerplate sentences to use on popular topics to memorize.
hyko 5y ago
After providing a description, you can add a phrase like "sometimes referred to as best effort." This practice is what used to be known as the activity formerly called sometimes referred to as best effort. It’s a free country, Google are free to publish their own dictionary if that is how they choose to spend their time on Earth. I am also free to ignore them.
- f6v 5y ago
  > I am also free to ignore them. If you live under a rock, maybe. Google has disproportionate influence.
  - hyko 5y ago
    They don’t under my rock!
znpy 5y ago
>> voila > Don't use. Oh shut up.
- speedgoose 5y ago
  https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voila https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voila It used to be one of their competitor in France about 20 years ago. Perhaps they just want their developers to not use it because of that.
- eythian 5y ago
  Seems reasonable to me for a style guideline to discourage this. They presumably don't want "do this, do that, and voila! Done." in their documentation because it doesn't come across as very professional.
o_m 5y ago
I wish there was a browser extension or some software for linting written human language, like ESLint. Then I could add these rules to my linting rules.
PurpleFoxy 5y ago
Looks like dang censored this post. Was number one for a minute.
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  Too many comments and not enough points sets off the flame war detector. And probably some users flagged it for being flame bait with an editorialized title too.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
the problem with these solutions is that they make two assumptions: 1. that language can be controlled via a top-down process, that a fiat issued from those with the power to determine things will create a language of greater moral stature than before. 2. that there is a sort of slippery slope of meaning that humanity follows when imprinted with language, and thus man meaning a man and not a woman and man meaning humanity will cause people to go around thinking that women aren't human. It is true that much of misogyny assumes that women aren't human, but there is a huge inductive gap from noticing this to jumping to the conclusion that the structure of our language is responsible. That said of #2 I think there is a weak function of this, but the moral crusaders always act like it is as strong as iron and must be broken or the world will never improve. Hence #1.
- josteink 5y ago
  I believe another aspect of point 1 is that, they believe that whatever injustices are out there in the world, will be fixed if they just change the language to be of such a format that such injustice can no longer be described. It's naive at best.
  - zimpenfish 5y ago
    > they believe that whatever injustices are out there in the world, will be fixed if they just change the language No, they believe that a relatively easy, cheap change can help them promote a more diverse environment which, hopefully, will be removing a small pebble from a giant wall. Remove enough of the pebbles, and the wall will eventually give away.
    - google234123 5y ago
      It may also have the opposite effect: Normal person sees this and thinks "wow, the far-left is crazy (is this a banned word?)".
learnstats2 5y ago
This is a normal style guide that every publishing company has, not a “banned words list”.
zo1 5y ago
I honestly think that working in an environment that happens to have these weird rules about arbitrary uses of terms is very toxic and discriminative, and deserves a re-look at in terms of worker rights about having a safe working environment (which this document pretty much guarantees they don't have). Next thing you know, because these words are now "codified", anyone that happens to utter these forbidden words or even worse, commit them into code, can potentially be called into some sort of disciplinary committee. Or even worse, be accused of "discrimination" by some random Google employee on Twitter.
rl3 5y ago
Why simply infer the intent behind words when you can undertake language sanitization to the point of madness.
underwater 5y ago
These sibling recommendations made me laugh. > user base; not userbase > username; not user name It highlight how arbitrary some of these rules are.
- goldsteinq 5y ago
  "user name" may be viewed as "real name of a user" (my user name is Max, but my username is Goldstein). userbase is just a rare spelling, and also the name of some software products.
applepple 5y ago
I was surprised about the word 'abort'. My open source project uses it as part of an error message when the connection attempt fails and it could be caused either intentionaly by the client or unintentionally by the server. The phrase 'connection handshake was cancelled' doesn't work because it implies that the client always canceled the handshake intentionally which is not always accurate. The phrase 'connection handshake was ended' also doesn't work; some people might read it wrong thinking that it completed successfully. The phrase 'connection handshake was aborted' is perfect because it could be the server's fault, could be the client's fault or could be a network issue. And it's clear in any case that the handshake did not finish correctly. I read that the word 'abort' was commonly used in aviation when discussing take off and landing so it seemed like a good parallel.
- MaKey 5y ago
  I think your use of 'abort' is apt and perfectly fine. I fail to see how 'abort' could be problematic, but if you really wanted you could feel offended by everything I guess.
72deluxe 5y ago
Odd that "hang, hung" is on there as "unnecessary voilent language". If a picture is hung on the wall, that is not violent! Very odd.
- kevincox 5y ago
  Especially since hung is not about hangings. The past tense of that is hanged.
- stordoff 5y ago
  According to the "inclusive language" page: > When possible, avoid the use of figurative language that can be interpreted as violent, such as hang and hit. Although there may also be nonviolent interpretations for these terms, avoiding their use prevents unintentional harm that might be caused by the violent interpretations.
  - noptd 5y ago
    Sounds to me like yet another attempt at shifting the overton window towards language being considered violence, which is authoritarian nonsense and deserves to be called out as such.
shatnersbassoon 5y ago
Nonce If your mission is to avoid offence and confusion and you're an international company, you should ban this one as its more offensive/emotive than 99.9% of the things on this list in UK English. But nope, it's OK apparently
rvz 5y ago
> blackhat, black hat, black-hat > Don't use. Instead, use precise terms for the kind of violation or practice, such as illegal, unethical, or in violation of rules. Can't mention 'Black Hat USA' anywhere even related to security, because Google says it is in their list of 'banned' words. /s We will now start the process of dismantling Black Hat USA because it is now 'offensive'. Maybe the actual problem is that companies like Google are forcing people to see almost everything in anything as racial and everyone copying them are constantly taking it all out of context just 'because FAAMNG is doing it'.
applepple 5y ago
>> hamburger, hamburger menu: Don't use. Instead use the aria-label What if Aria reminds me of "Aryan" and is a trigger word?
HelloNurse 5y ago
A glossary is guaranteed to teach new words, and for me it's been STONITH/STOMITH (filed as "unnecessarily violent").
flippinburgers 5y ago
Exhausting, puritanical, and fantastically simplistic "pattern" matching of words. This attaches meanings to words where the engineering context and negative connotation/meaning were completely and utterly separate from one another.
gher-shyu3i 5y ago
> flag (command-line context) Looks like Google backed golang needs to change their library: https://golang.org/pkg/flag/ https://golang.org/pkg/flag/
deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
grumple 5y ago
Is this entire guide enforced by an automated linter, or must google devs actually waste time remembering such trivialities? This is bikeshedding if I ever saw it.
yamrzou 5y ago
> male-adapter > Don't use. Instead, use a genderless word like plug. > man hours, manhours, man-hours > Avoid using gendered terms. Instead use terms like person hours. > man-in-the-middle (MITM) > Avoid using gendered terms. Instead use terms like on-path attacker, person-in-the-middle (PITM). Seriously? What kind of non-sense is this?
eplanit 5y ago
It seems like half of the rules are about political correctness, a quarter about consistency, and the rest about proper usage. I can picture the "committee" that produced this. It has some good points, but is good material for parody and ridicule, too.
at_a_remove 5y ago
So much of the past on display here is doubleplus ungood.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
> agnostic > Don't use. Instead, use a precise term like platform-independent. Oh, FFS. I've been agnostic for half of my life and I don't know a single one agnostic that would want that. In fact, I feel more offended that it's on this novlang manual.
- lobotryas 5y ago
  What I love most are the efforts spent protecting hypothetical people who may take offense and who aren’t actually there. “Oh, you’re actually agnostic? Well, you still can’t say that word because another agnostic person may find it offensive.”
- ali_m 5y ago
  I think this is about clarity rather than political correctness. Used in this context, "agnostic" is basically just a bit of jargon that's used where what we really mean is "independent". The latter is a drop-in replacement, and I'd argue that it conveys the meaning more clearly.
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    I can rewrite your entire documentation using clearer words than the ones you are using. Are they going to go through the whole dictionary to eliminate all those non-double-plus-good words that are not efficient enough? Don't you feel that it's just getting ridiculous at this point?
    - ali_m 5y ago
      I'm not sure what you're getting at - if you agree with me that "independent" is clearer than "agnostic" then what's the problem? I could understand your objection if you felt that the replacement word was somehow less clear, but if it's at least as good or better then why _not_ mandate its use in a style guide? I get the impression that most of the people who are complaining in the comments here are really getting worked up about some inferred political bias, rather than because they actually disagree with the substance of the style guide.
egberts1 5y ago
It’s “Content-Type”, not “Media-Type”. There’s a reason for covering URI things larger than media.
est 5y ago
Now I want a spell checker for it.
brodouevencode 5y ago
“Political correctness is America's newest form of intolerance, and it is especially pernicious because it comes disguised as tolerance. It presents itself as fairness, yet attempts to restrict and control people's language with strict codes and rigid rules. I'm not sure that's the way to fight discrimination. I'm not sure silencing people or forcing them to alter their speech is the best method for solving problems that go much deeper than speech.” - George Carlin
daveoc64 5y ago
Reading this, I'm very pleased to see that it often recommends against US-centric words and phrases. There's often so much assumption that readers are in the US (see the comments here for several examples).
egberts1 5y ago
Persist: OK: To make the token persist ... Doesn’t that verb supposed to be in a singular form like in “To make the token persists ...”?
- learnstats2 5y ago
  This grammatical structure in English is make + object + bare infinitive, e.g. “make it happen”. https://www.englishgrammar.org/bare-infinitive-2/ https://www.englishgrammar.org/bare-infinitive-2/
dang 5y ago
The submitted title was "Google developer banned words list". That broke the site guidelines quite badly. Accounts that do that eventually lose submission privileges, so please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html A good title might be "Developer documentation style guide: Word List" (composed from the headings) or the current title above, which a mod took from the opening paragraph.
egberts1 5y ago
Let’s enforce these new definitions on poets, says no one ever.
bobthechef 5y ago
I found "socket" triggering. It sounds too much like "sock it" and that is needlessly violent. "Plug" is also quite shocking. It suggests something non-consensual and thus needlessly violent.
egberts1 5y ago
Good luck with translating to gendered langauages, like Español.
mc32 5y ago
> “America, American Use only to refer to the Americas or the American continent. Don't use to refer to the United States. Instead, use a more precise term like the US or the United States, and people in the US. For more information, see US.” This is pedantic and not right and is also prescriptive. The combined continents are “The Americas”, else the individual continents are South America and North America. There exists no single continent, either America or the Americas, but is rather a word used when talking about these two continents as a unit --which isn't a unit anyway. Virtually no one refers to inhabitants of the continents as “Americans”. American(s)is reserved for people from the US (including in South America) Just as Asians doesn’t refer to everyone who lives in the continent of Asia. The demonym "American" stands for a person from the USA. Just as Mexican refers to a person from the USM (United States of Mexico as translated from Spanish).
- jobigoud 5y ago
  People from the US are estadounidense in Spanish-speaking countries. "American" is always ambiguous and pretty arrogant to think it should be universally understood in other cultures of America to be honest. The way to split the continents is cultural. For example look at the Olympic games logo. The rings represent the five continents, also the ones I learned at school: Europe, Asia, Africa, America, Australia.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - mc32 5y ago
    >"People from the US are estadounidense in Spanish-speaking countries." I think that depends on the person. I mostly hear, so and so "es Americano" to refer to Americans. There has NEVER been a case where "Americano" means someone from either SAm or NAm. It's just not used that way. With regards to the Olympics, it's just a logo. You obviously know there is no geographical continent of Europe or Asia but rather Eurasia. The Western Hemisphere is the opposite, there there are two continents North America and South America, there is no continent of The Americas. There are two distinct landmasses. Besides, colloquial and in general speech American refers to people from the US. Only prescriptivists (who typically are anti prescriptivists elsewhere) insists that it refers to people from two different continents. I've heard "norte Americano" to refer to both people from what they sometimes call "Anglo-saxon America" (US and Canada) which seems to map as the opposite of Latin American. It usually excludes Mexicans who are referred to as Mexicano and not as norte americano because they are considered part of LatAm.
tobbob 5y ago
Is there a version of this minus the woke bs?
peterhadlaw 5y ago
Sanity check failed.

168 points by PurpleFoxy 5y ago

randomcarbloke 5y ago

it fails even a generous coherence check.

bendbro 5y ago

I always open emails from Google recruiters to trigger the tracking pixel and then am sure to not respond.

JackPoach 5y ago

Some recommendations are, well, weird.

traveler01 5y ago

What a waste of time...

zylanx 5y ago

Hmm. Some highlights. So you can't say a process has "hung" or "hanged". You can't say you've "killed" a process. Can't say "Sanity check". That isn't allowed. Can't even say "Sane". Can't use "Dummy variable". Can't say "Manpower", "Manned", "Manmade". You also can't use "Male/Female Adapter". Can't say "Dumb down".

zylanx 5y ago
So you also can't say "First class". Guess that rules out "First class concept"
- js8 5y ago
  You can't say it, but you can fly it? :-)
jrek 5y ago
To be far these restrictions operate in a fairly narrow domain (Developer documentation) where some restrictions on idiomatic usage are probably warranted to maximise the number of people that can fully comprehend the docs (for example not all languages refer to adapters as 'male' or 'female' and the meaning may not be obvious to a non native speaker.) Secondly, "This guide contains guidelines, not rules. Depart from it when doing so improves your content."
- f6v 5y ago
  > the meaning may not be obvious to a non native speaker In Russian you’d say “mom-dad” adapter. I mean, the principle it refers to is universal. I also think this is the first step towards aggressively policing the language, even though it starts as a guideline.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    > I also think this is the first step towards aggressively policing the language, even though it starts as a guideline. Language changes over time, as easy as that. Sometimes change comes in gradually over decades or centuries, sometimes change comes revolutionary (e.g. rap music lingo establishing itself in mainstream culture). Especially in the example case of music, "policing" has been a constant reality (e.g. "bleeping out" of words or outright refusal to air content on TV/radio or parents forbidding their children to listen to rap or metal music because of "satanism" fears), yet no one complained there while now there is constant complaining about replacing of actually racially charged words?!
    - f6v 5y ago
      > yet no one complained I constantly complain about Eminem’s music videos cutting the words out. > replacing actually racially charged words You said it yourself, language changes. Just don’t charge the words, simple as that. Words are sound waves, or pixels on the screen. And it’s people who give them meaning. It seems to me that the ideas behind the words won’t get anywhere if you just ban words.
    - 5y ago
0xy 5y ago
This kind of assault on language is really hostile to newcomers. Open docs, Ctrl + F for "blacklist" to figure out how to quickly stop a nefarious user, can't find it, look somewhere else. How much economic damage will it cause to deliberately muddy the waters of terminology?
- busymom0 5y ago
  Not sure why you are getting downvoted. You make a very valid point and this type of political correctness nonsense will get some people get in some dangerous situations. It's like I am living in the twilight zone.
  - chalst 5y ago
    Not all PC is nonsense. Language is indeed sometimes used as a weapon, and disadvantaged groups are often the least able to defend themselves. Asserting that all PC is nonsense is just the kind of violation of the curious-not-dogmatic ethos that prevails here that will attract downvotes. If you have difficulties understanding why some might consider the GP post on the edge, you maybe don't understand this culture and should perhaps spend some time reading dang's moderation comments.
busymom0 5y ago
Terms like man-in-the-middle, master-slave, whitelist/blacklist, abort which I barely learned 5 years ago in University are now being cancelled. Even first-class isn't to be used according to Google. But "premium, or platinum-level" is okay. I guess the people making these political decisions must be elites with "premium platinum level" control over Google. If this wasn't HN, I would have posted some super obscene comment on how absolutely "slowed, invalid and insensible" some of these political ones are. Are we going to change traffic lights from yellow and red to something else too now? How long before terminal commands need to be renamed from kill, man, fat32 to something else?
- stevehawk 5y ago
  We'll change traffic light colors if some white people with Ph.D.s in Silicon Valley decide they're racist and need do their daily virtue signalling so they can pat themselves on the back and say "we did it! we fixed racism!".
mahoho 5y ago
> Male/Female Adapter I dunno. I don't care about any of the other terms, but describing plugs and receptacles in terms of penetrative heterosexual intercourse has always made me a little uncomfortable.
- terom 5y ago
  I will never forget the embarrassment of visiting the electronics store as a kid, and naively asking for a DB-9 sex changer :D
- jobigoud 5y ago
  It's the perfect analogy. Most people will understand it without an explanation.
  - bhandziuk 5y ago
    It's great too because it has no bias.

foxes 5y ago

Most of these are perfectly reasonable, a lot to do with helping clarity of writing. Abbreviations definitely do not help clarity and should be avoided. Colloquialisms also do not help clarity if it is meant to be understood by a large audience (international even). As for the ones that hacker news by and large seems to think are controversial, I agree with the style guide, there are only historical arguments for keeping gendered/race based language. Why not remove it. Language is dynamic, it can evolve.

hnaccy 5y ago
Blacklist and similar are not race based.
- btgeekboy 5y ago
  The point is to remove the positive connotation for "white" and negative for "black." Nobody's implying your blacklist-turned-blocklist has anything to do with race.
  - LudwigNagasena 5y ago
    It feels like it would be easier to stop calling people black and white rather than purge all light-based metaphors from the language.
    - goto11 5y ago
      How would Google make the rest of the English-speaking world change their use of these words?
      - f6v 5y ago
        Maybe it shouldn’t even try? I mean, since when is an internet ad company qualified to tell me what language to use?
        5y ago

vmception 5y ago

I appreciate how they are using their platform, it is an option and they are choosing that option. It would be nice if their IDE linter would help this along though, compliance would be tricky for developers.

2rsf 5y ago

Mostly logical and makes sense, BUT how is one supposed to go over all those? is there lint tool to check documentations?

itsyaboi 5y ago
Of course! Many person-hours will be spent on inclusive language tooling and services that will carefully keep track of your word offenses, with automated reminders of any infractions!
- 6sup6 5y ago
  Don't give them ideas, please.
  - itsyaboi 5y ago
    My comment was not tongue in cheek. This is already happening at FAANG.
    - erik_seaberg 5y ago
      I have actually seen a linter complain about “mastercard” in a JSON commit. In payment processing, we don’t get to change that.

nfrankel 5y ago

The biggest issue I see in this list is that it compounds multiple concerns: grammar, Google and socio-political (or however you choose to call it). While it makes a lot of sense for Google, I have no reason to use it if I'm not a Googler (and even then).

ali_m 5y ago
I think the goal is to provide practical guidance to developers. Splitting it into N different lists seems strictly worse in this regard.
- josteink 5y ago
  > Splitting it into N different lists seems strictly worse in this regard. Not at all. If I could find three lists: - common imprecise language used by developers, and how to improve it. - common grammar errors among developers. - San Fransisco deep-left political preferences wrt to code documentation. I would know which two which would be of use to me, and which one I should absolutely ignore.
  - ali_m 5y ago
    Well, it's a policy document for Google developers, who presumably aren't free to just pick and choose which rules to follow. I personally agree with ~95% of the list, and the other 5% seems too trivial to be worth arguing over. I couldn't care less about the motivation behind the rules (political or otherwise) as long as they don't sacrifice clarity, and I think that's basically true for everything in here.

baxuz 5y ago

- AM, PM To be consistent with Material Design, use all-caps, no periods, and a space before. Recommended: 9:00 AM I'm gonna be snarky and say to just use 24h time in developer documentation. - APIs; not API's This isn't a style decision. It's basic grammar - authN, authZ Don't use. Instead, use authentication or authorization. But i18n and a11y is fine it seems? -manmade, man made Avoid using gendered terms. Instead use a word like artificial, manufactured, or synthetic. "Man" refers to a person, or specifically an individual of the human species in this context. -master Use with caution. Never use in conjunction with slave. Finally, a rational decision.

hef19898 5y ago
How dare you? What's next, the metric system?
- azalemeth 5y ago
  One thing that particularly annoyed me about their en-gb vs en-us spelling example was "tonne" vs "ton". They are different! I do wonder if America will _ever_ make the switch to the metric system. The French managed it in 1799; backwards Britain had mostly managed it by 1972; and yet working with US engineers means that I occasionally find myself converting units like slugs or "circular mils" into SI units for FEM modelling. Wolfram alpha is a godsend. I just really, really hate the US unit system with a passion!
  - ghaff 5y ago
    As someone who is pretty indifferent about metric and US customary units on a day to day basis, the one area as a onetime mechanical engineer I think is pretty annoying is US mass/force units in engineering calculations.
  - nerdkid93 5y ago
    Technically, America is metric in that our units are based on metric units now. So 1 yard is defined as 0.9144 meter and 1 pound (avoirdupois) is 0.45359237 kg[0]. 0: https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/PUBS_LIB/FedRegister/FRdoc59-5442.pdf https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/PUBS_LIB/FedRegister/FRdoc59-5442.p...

shp0ngle 5y ago

One would say, it's a word blacklist.... ...oh.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

imgabe 5y ago

A better title would be Google Developer Style Guide, as most of these are just suggestions to be more precise and standardize names for things. For the bits that want to be culture war flashpoints, I mean yeah, it’s dumb, but I’m just so tired of this. Can we just put all the speech police in a corner so they can argue with each other about the most perfectly inoffensive way to say things while everyone else does real work?

thinkingemote 5y ago

I found the removal of verbs for certain obviously contentious words interesting. It's not possible to say "this was denylisted" for example.

btgeekboy 5y ago
"This was denylisted" works perfectly fine. It's no different grammatically from "This was blacklisted;" the only difference is you aren't used to it yet.
- LudwigNagasena 5y ago
  “Black” is an adjective and “deny” is a verb, so the compound words derived from them may work differently.
- alacombe 5y ago
  Isn't the whole concept behind "denylisting" introducing harmful remainder of segregation and discrimination ?
- hardlianotion 5y ago
  Denylisted looks like it was assembled by committee.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
pseudalopex 5y ago
It's just not recommended. And it's just because saying what adding something to the list does is more precise than saying black list or deny list.
Pfhreak 5y ago
Denylist contains the verb you are looking for, the phrase would be, "This was denied." That's the point of the change -- it's clearer about what happened.

ramblerman 5y ago

I see the benefit of standardizing some language across documentation, but I feel a lot of politically charged items were also taken out which ironically make some things harder to understand, as they are just so commonplace. > fat client : don't use fat > the process is hanging : don't use hang/hung > dummy variable : don't use dumb > we treat this client as a first-class citizen : don't use first-class citizen > DMZ : use a more precise term like perimeter network. > DLQ : use unprocessed messages queue > whitelist/blacklist : use deny list or allow list > blackbox : use opaque-box > sanity check : use coherence check > kebab case : use dash case

kabes 5y ago
What's the problem with using a word like fat in a way that has no negative connotation (as in fat client)?
- alpaca128 5y ago
  Same as "sanity check". It seems people with severe anxiety or similar issues prefer to change their surrounding environment to not be reminded of their possible perceived shortcomings instead of getting professional help. It's sad that this happens in the first place, but also in the same breath as change proposals in the name of fighting racism and other discrimination. I don't want to sound insensitive, but people who struggle with encountering terms like "fat" or "sanity" in their everyday life could achieve a significantly better quality of life by improving themselves. I know that from first-hand experience and from professionals who actually have patients with fear of flying and all kinds of other ailments, and I think being so accomodating actually hurts the affected people more in the long term than it helps.
  - objectivetruth 5y ago
    If making an innocuous and minor change to your vocabulary to help a colleague bothers you so much, maybe it's you that needs the professional help. (Your implied "solution" of "all people with severe anxiety should just get professional help to solve it" incorrectly presumes that professional help always solves that problem AND greatly over-estimates the number of people that have access to said professional help.) That's just me, though. I'm already an oddity on HN because I don't care if an employer fires people for saying racist things nor do I care if a social media company chooses to end its professional relationship with a user that posts anti-vax nonsense.

Zealotux 5y ago

Working in a GAFAM these days sounds like working in a minefield.

andrew_v4 5y ago
Yeah, this is an underrated comment. I mean the origin of some of this stuff is to be inclusive and diverse, but ironically it has the effect of making people walk on eggshells all the time and not feel like they can act normally. It's like that scene in x-men (x-people now?) first class when magneto tells mystique that if she's using half her energy to be someone else all the time, she'll never be at her full potential. If you're constantly screening your code, writing, and speech for increasingly obscure ways that people could get offended, you're not working at your full potential.
6sup6 5y ago
I can confirm that. And I feel it everyday.

tsujp 5y ago

"The term man (from Proto-Germanic *mann- "person") and words derived from it can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their sex or age." [1] As with most things Google does this will set some kind of precedent that a non-trivial subset may follow on with. Where does this stop though? Human -> Huperson? What do we rename the `kill` command to? How will that affect scripts that use it? The result of that is to then have a shim to `kill` anyway so the net result is a tonne of stuff breaks and `kill` is still present? I'm all for improving our use of language but a lot of these kinds of changes are virtue signals that don't enact any meaningful change at all [2][3]. There are lots of words taken out of context purposefully for instance, "my process is hung" has nothing to do with hanging of human beings. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_(word) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_(word) [2] https://mooseyanon.medium.com/github-f-ck-your-name-change-de599033bbbe https://mooseyanon.medium.com/github-f-ck-your-name-change-d... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26487854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26487854

adrian17 5y ago
Similarly: > guys, you guys: When referring to a group of people use non-gendered language, such as everyone or folks. Isn't the plural form "guys" already explicitly inclusive?
- bbarnett 5y ago
  Some of this is so colloquial. Where I live, 'guys' is even used by women, when speaking to a group of other women. People assuming how they use language, is right, assumes that there is one language, eg, one english, not many. Very 'centre of the universe' thinking.
  - kevincox 5y ago
    While this is true isn't it helpful to make people feel included. I grew up in Toronto, Canada where "guys" was widely used as a gender-neutral term in most contexts (admittedly there are some phrases where a gender is heavily implied). However when I was working at a tech company in Dublin, Ireland I noticed that if I addressed a room with "guys" women in the room would often feel excluded. This is not unreasonable given the different dialects and the minority of women in this setting. So sure, we could say that she is wrong for feeling excluded but when many minorities already feel excluded it seems wrong to use language that reaffirms that nagging feeling constantly whispering to them from the back of their mind. And avoiding the term "guys" is a simple case even though "Y'all" and "folks" sound really odd to me, I agree that there is a huge spectrum here and the line of what is reasonable and what isn't is incredibly fuzzy.

Traubenfuchs 5y ago

Do Googlers read this nanny guide? Do they follow it? Does anyone complain if they don't?

PurpleFoxy 5y ago
I got linked this list from a googler who was tired of wasting brain cycles on working out how to word comments in allowed ways.
Nextgrid 5y ago
> Does anyone complain if they don't? There will most definitely be some useless people in there that don't have anything better to do than police this in the name of "diversity and inclusion" so yes.
6sup6 5y ago
Im aware of a few words but I don't read the guide. It is (almost) literally a minefield to work with these people. I'm here just for the green card and the huge bonus I'm getting. If you can, avoid this company.

DrBazza 5y ago

I see the US tech industry is trying to export its weird culture wars to the rest of the world.

slver 5y ago

It's a good list, mostly. It's just nearly impossible to memorize. I also think sometimes about terms like whitelist and blacklist. The problem isn't that they refer to race. The problem is that "white" and "black" refer to race. White and black are basic colors, and assigning meaning to colors is natural and unavoidable. However "white people" aren't "white", and "black people" aren't "black". So IMHO the focus should be on dropping racial connotations from colors. If we're fine with not calling Asians "yellow" and Native Americans "red", we should be fine with that too. Imagine if we couldn't have yellow and red traffic lights, because it'd be offensive to a race.

codefined 5y ago
Sometimes avoiding those connotations are exceptionally hard, verging on impossible. In comparison, it seems a documentation change from whitelist to allowlist might just be a single find & replace away for a project.
- thefz 5y ago
  > Sometimes avoiding those connotations are exceptionally hard That is 100% an anglo-saxon world problem since most European languages either differentiate between words for skin color and color name, or using the color name to describe skin color isn't considered racist at all. I would stretch it even to mark it as an US-only problem.
  - falcolas 5y ago
    Instead, European languages have a tendency to gender everything. I imagine that’s an untapped “problem” in some folks’ eyes that will boil over sooner or later.
    - anon98356 5y ago
      I was recently in France and was told by a local this was actually an issue with the covid outbreak. There is a department that decides on the gender of new words and they determined covid (or some variant on that) to be feminine.

tester34 5y ago

>smartphone >Don't use. Instead, use mobile phone or phone. weird

omega3 5y ago

Some of them are baffling. regex - Don't use. Instead, use regular expression

BlueParanoia 5y ago
This is a style guide, not a word blacklist. They suggest not using regex because it's not as clear, especially to thought who never learned what regex is, as regular expression.
- josteink 5y ago
  > This is a style guide, not a word blacklist. You're not allowed to say that :D
- omega3 5y ago
  I think the reverse is actually true, more people know what regex is than what it stands for (especially if their first language isn't English). https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=regex,regular%20expressions https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=regex,regu...
  - kevincox 5y ago
    Exactly. Some acronyms are more commonly known than their "expanded" form making the former the better name to use. For example I don't see many people spelling out Hyper-Text Transport Protocol.
- blackshaw 5y ago
  How could anyone with more than 5 minutes experience as a software developer possibly not know what a "regex" is?
nickysielicki 5y ago
This is further complicated by the fact that “regular expression” typically refers to the more academic form of regular expressions (eg: regular languages), whereas “regex” tends to refer to the extended PCRE-style regexs with various non-regular features.

WalterBright 5y ago

My style guide is simpler. You should not use "you" in technical documentation. You can just search for "you" and you can delete them, and you will see that the text becomes better.

Angostura 5y ago
Should not use "" in technical documentation. can just just search for "" and can delete them, and will see that the text becomes better.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Lookin' good!
  - yesenadam 5y ago
    Hahaha :D – so funny. Thank you Walter, I needed that laugh.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

nickysielicki 5y ago

> man-in-the-middle (MITM) Avoid using gendered terms. Instead use terms like on-path attacker, person-in-the-middle (PITM). This one got me. You can’t just replace “MITM” with “PITM” and expect anyone to know what you’re talking about. I know what MITM means. I have no idea what PITM means at first glance. I suspect that nobody does. So my main question is, who wrote that? Because I can’t imagine any technical person seriously suggesting that replacement.

domenukk 5y ago
Machine in the Middle or Malice in the Middle are better options imho
polar 5y ago
Pain In The M?
bennyp101 5y ago
Seems that it was a Google VP? https://twitter.com/daveksecure/status/1279194357116006400?lang=en https://twitter.com/daveksecure/status/1279194357116006400?l... But yea, changing terms like that is not very helpful, unless everyone is onboard
- dustinmoris 5y ago
  The funny thing is that his own name is not even gender neutral: "Kleidermacher" means Clothes maker, but it's the male version of it. The female version would be "Kleidermacherin". It's interesting because if he has a wife then his own wife has a male version of the last name. Interestingly in Polish we always had gender versioned names. My name is Gorski, which is the male version for "Man from the mountains", but my mum and sister are "Gorska" which means "Women from the mountain". It was always like this. My grandpa was Gorski and my grandma was Gorska. This does not exist in German, there is no "Kleidermacherin" as a last name. Just wanted to point this out as an interesting thing I noticed.
  - b3tta 5y ago

bennyp101 5y ago

Aside from the obvious ones, whose debate is polarized, there are some that would actually make things harder to understand (especially if one didn't know this list existed) I assume this is for writing documentation/code for Google products, so if internal only, then I guess everyone is on-board and would get used to it. If it is for external consumption as well, then it potentially just make things harder to grok. A "full-featured client" is not the same as a "fat client" to me. "opaque-box" when reading would make me stop, think 'oh, do I need to look that up?' then realise it just means that it is blackbox and I should just not bother with it. Reminds me of those people who like to use much longer and fancy words for something that does not need it.

mschuster91 5y ago
> If it is for external consumption as well, then it potentially just make things harder to grok. On the other side, what megacorps such as Google or Facebook adopt influences everyone else. While some of the terms on this list tend to be a bit nit-picky, it's not a bad thing to replace stuff such as master/slave or blacklist/whitelist... and having big-name influencers commit to that is a huge step forward. From a political view: ideally this whole debate should have been done in the open, in democratic discourse, but unfortunately Congress has been gridlocked for the most part of the last decades, and mass media these days more serves to outrage and click-baiting (for the sake of ad money) instead of hosting civilized debate.
- bennyp101 5y ago
  I have zero problem with "master/slave or blacklist/whitelist.." stuff, I just didn't mention it because everyone has their own view, and had been discussed to the nth. "megacorps such as Google or Facebook adopt influences everyone else" I don't really agree with this, they try and push their own agenda, but ultimately the community decides what it wants to do
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  You think Congress should compel using certain terms?

JPDSm8NTaAYBHd 5y ago

I add whitelist/blacklist to every codebase to offset this leftism.

znpy 5y ago

>> ninja > Don't use to refer to a person. Instead, use a term such as expert. OK to use in reference to companies, tools, software packages, and other entities that use the term in their names. I guess? >> OK or okay; not ok or Okay Now that's borderline silly ?

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>> OK or okay; not ok or Okay that's a style rule, many of these other rules are social rules. It is silly to mix the two. on edit: just to note I was agreeing with you it's a silly rule, but it is silly in the context that they have all these social and moral requirements and then they blithely mix in something that is at a different level of concern. I feel these guidelines were written by a Junior Dev on the English Language project.
gnoll_of_gozag 5y ago
what if i say okey
bhandziuk 5y ago
I'm ok with this "ninja" language not being used. It's the same as "guru". Who ever says those works usually sounds like they don't know what they are talking about.

intricatedetail 5y ago

What a minefield. It's good to learn that list for use in real life to, so that you don't get cancelled. I am waiting for a list of what you are allowed to think and boilerplate sentences to use on popular topics to memorize.

hyko 5y ago

After providing a description, you can add a phrase like "sometimes referred to as best effort." This practice is what used to be known as the activity formerly called sometimes referred to as best effort. It’s a free country, Google are free to publish their own dictionary if that is how they choose to spend their time on Earth. I am also free to ignore them.

f6v 5y ago
> I am also free to ignore them. If you live under a rock, maybe. Google has disproportionate influence.
- hyko 5y ago
  They don’t under my rock!

znpy 5y ago

>> voila > Don't use. Oh shut up.

speedgoose 5y ago
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voila https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voila It used to be one of their competitor in France about 20 years ago. Perhaps they just want their developers to not use it because of that.
eythian 5y ago
Seems reasonable to me for a style guideline to discourage this. They presumably don't want "do this, do that, and voila! Done." in their documentation because it doesn't come across as very professional.

o_m 5y ago

I wish there was a browser extension or some software for linting written human language, like ESLint. Then I could add these rules to my linting rules.

PurpleFoxy 5y ago

Looks like dang censored this post. Was number one for a minute.

pseudalopex 5y ago
Too many comments and not enough points sets off the flame war detector. And probably some users flagged it for being flame bait with an editorialized title too.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

the problem with these solutions is that they make two assumptions: 1. that language can be controlled via a top-down process, that a fiat issued from those with the power to determine things will create a language of greater moral stature than before. 2. that there is a sort of slippery slope of meaning that humanity follows when imprinted with language, and thus man meaning a man and not a woman and man meaning humanity will cause people to go around thinking that women aren't human. It is true that much of misogyny assumes that women aren't human, but there is a huge inductive gap from noticing this to jumping to the conclusion that the structure of our language is responsible. That said of #2 I think there is a weak function of this, but the moral crusaders always act like it is as strong as iron and must be broken or the world will never improve. Hence #1.

josteink 5y ago
I believe another aspect of point 1 is that, they believe that whatever injustices are out there in the world, will be fixed if they just change the language to be of such a format that such injustice can no longer be described. It's naive at best.
- zimpenfish 5y ago
  > they believe that whatever injustices are out there in the world, will be fixed if they just change the language No, they believe that a relatively easy, cheap change can help them promote a more diverse environment which, hopefully, will be removing a small pebble from a giant wall. Remove enough of the pebbles, and the wall will eventually give away.
  - google234123 5y ago
    It may also have the opposite effect: Normal person sees this and thinks "wow, the far-left is crazy (is this a banned word?)".

learnstats2 5y ago

This is a normal style guide that every publishing company has, not a “banned words list”.

zo1 5y ago

I honestly think that working in an environment that happens to have these weird rules about arbitrary uses of terms is very toxic and discriminative, and deserves a re-look at in terms of worker rights about having a safe working environment (which this document pretty much guarantees they don't have). Next thing you know, because these words are now "codified", anyone that happens to utter these forbidden words or even worse, commit them into code, can potentially be called into some sort of disciplinary committee. Or even worse, be accused of "discrimination" by some random Google employee on Twitter.

rl3 5y ago

Why simply infer the intent behind words when you can undertake language sanitization to the point of madness.

underwater 5y ago

These sibling recommendations made me laugh. > user base; not userbase > username; not user name It highlight how arbitrary some of these rules are.

goldsteinq 5y ago
"user name" may be viewed as "real name of a user" (my user name is Max, but my username is Goldstein). userbase is just a rare spelling, and also the name of some software products.

applepple 5y ago

I was surprised about the word 'abort'. My open source project uses it as part of an error message when the connection attempt fails and it could be caused either intentionaly by the client or unintentionally by the server. The phrase 'connection handshake was cancelled' doesn't work because it implies that the client always canceled the handshake intentionally which is not always accurate. The phrase 'connection handshake was ended' also doesn't work; some people might read it wrong thinking that it completed successfully. The phrase 'connection handshake was aborted' is perfect because it could be the server's fault, could be the client's fault or could be a network issue. And it's clear in any case that the handshake did not finish correctly. I read that the word 'abort' was commonly used in aviation when discussing take off and landing so it seemed like a good parallel.

MaKey 5y ago
I think your use of 'abort' is apt and perfectly fine. I fail to see how 'abort' could be problematic, but if you really wanted you could feel offended by everything I guess.

72deluxe 5y ago

Odd that "hang, hung" is on there as "unnecessary voilent language". If a picture is hung on the wall, that is not violent! Very odd.

kevincox 5y ago
Especially since hung is not about hangings. The past tense of that is hanged.
stordoff 5y ago
According to the "inclusive language" page: > When possible, avoid the use of figurative language that can be interpreted as violent, such as hang and hit. Although there may also be nonviolent interpretations for these terms, avoiding their use prevents unintentional harm that might be caused by the violent interpretations.
- noptd 5y ago
  Sounds to me like yet another attempt at shifting the overton window towards language being considered violence, which is authoritarian nonsense and deserves to be called out as such.

shatnersbassoon 5y ago

Nonce If your mission is to avoid offence and confusion and you're an international company, you should ban this one as its more offensive/emotive than 99.9% of the things on this list in UK English. But nope, it's OK apparently

rvz 5y ago

> blackhat, black hat, black-hat > Don't use. Instead, use precise terms for the kind of violation or practice, such as illegal, unethical, or in violation of rules. Can't mention 'Black Hat USA' anywhere even related to security, because Google says it is in their list of 'banned' words. /s We will now start the process of dismantling Black Hat USA because it is now 'offensive'. Maybe the actual problem is that companies like Google are forcing people to see almost everything in anything as racial and everyone copying them are constantly taking it all out of context just 'because FAAMNG is doing it'.

applepple 5y ago

>> hamburger, hamburger menu: Don't use. Instead use the aria-label What if Aria reminds me of "Aryan" and is a trigger word?

HelloNurse 5y ago

A glossary is guaranteed to teach new words, and for me it's been STONITH/STOMITH (filed as "unnecessarily violent").

flippinburgers 5y ago

Exhausting, puritanical, and fantastically simplistic "pattern" matching of words. This attaches meanings to words where the engineering context and negative connotation/meaning were completely and utterly separate from one another.

gher-shyu3i 5y ago

> flag (command-line context) Looks like Google backed golang needs to change their library: https://golang.org/pkg/flag/ https://golang.org/pkg/flag/

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grumple 5y ago

Is this entire guide enforced by an automated linter, or must google devs actually waste time remembering such trivialities? This is bikeshedding if I ever saw it.

yamrzou 5y ago

> male-adapter > Don't use. Instead, use a genderless word like plug. > man hours, manhours, man-hours > Avoid using gendered terms. Instead use terms like person hours. > man-in-the-middle (MITM) > Avoid using gendered terms. Instead use terms like on-path attacker, person-in-the-middle (PITM). Seriously? What kind of non-sense is this?

eplanit 5y ago

It seems like half of the rules are about political correctness, a quarter about consistency, and the rest about proper usage. I can picture the "committee" that produced this. It has some good points, but is good material for parody and ridicule, too.

at_a_remove 5y ago

So much of the past on display here is doubleplus ungood.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

> agnostic > Don't use. Instead, use a precise term like platform-independent. Oh, FFS. I've been agnostic for half of my life and I don't know a single one agnostic that would want that. In fact, I feel more offended that it's on this novlang manual.

lobotryas 5y ago
What I love most are the efforts spent protecting hypothetical people who may take offense and who aren’t actually there. “Oh, you’re actually agnostic? Well, you still can’t say that word because another agnostic person may find it offensive.”
ali_m 5y ago
I think this is about clarity rather than political correctness. Used in this context, "agnostic" is basically just a bit of jargon that's used where what we really mean is "independent". The latter is a drop-in replacement, and I'd argue that it conveys the meaning more clearly.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  I can rewrite your entire documentation using clearer words than the ones you are using. Are they going to go through the whole dictionary to eliminate all those non-double-plus-good words that are not efficient enough? Don't you feel that it's just getting ridiculous at this point?
  - ali_m 5y ago
    I'm not sure what you're getting at - if you agree with me that "independent" is clearer than "agnostic" then what's the problem? I could understand your objection if you felt that the replacement word was somehow less clear, but if it's at least as good or better then why _not_ mandate its use in a style guide? I get the impression that most of the people who are complaining in the comments here are really getting worked up about some inferred political bias, rather than because they actually disagree with the substance of the style guide.

egberts1 5y ago

It’s “Content-Type”, not “Media-Type”. There’s a reason for covering URI things larger than media.

est 5y ago

Now I want a spell checker for it.

brodouevencode 5y ago

“Political correctness is America's newest form of intolerance, and it is especially pernicious because it comes disguised as tolerance. It presents itself as fairness, yet attempts to restrict and control people's language with strict codes and rigid rules. I'm not sure that's the way to fight discrimination. I'm not sure silencing people or forcing them to alter their speech is the best method for solving problems that go much deeper than speech.” - George Carlin

daveoc64 5y ago

Reading this, I'm very pleased to see that it often recommends against US-centric words and phrases. There's often so much assumption that readers are in the US (see the comments here for several examples).

egberts1 5y ago

Persist: OK: To make the token persist ... Doesn’t that verb supposed to be in a singular form like in “To make the token persists ...”?

learnstats2 5y ago
This grammatical structure in English is make + object + bare infinitive, e.g. “make it happen”. https://www.englishgrammar.org/bare-infinitive-2/ https://www.englishgrammar.org/bare-infinitive-2/

dang 5y ago

The submitted title was "Google developer banned words list". That broke the site guidelines quite badly. Accounts that do that eventually lose submission privileges, so please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html A good title might be "Developer documentation style guide: Word List" (composed from the headings) or the current title above, which a mod took from the opening paragraph.

egberts1 5y ago

Let’s enforce these new definitions on poets, says no one ever.

bobthechef 5y ago

I found "socket" triggering. It sounds too much like "sock it" and that is needlessly violent. "Plug" is also quite shocking. It suggests something non-consensual and thus needlessly violent.

egberts1 5y ago

Good luck with translating to gendered langauages, like Español.

mc32 5y ago

> “America, American Use only to refer to the Americas or the American continent. Don't use to refer to the United States. Instead, use a more precise term like the US or the United States, and people in the US. For more information, see US.” This is pedantic and not right and is also prescriptive. The combined continents are “The Americas”, else the individual continents are South America and North America. There exists no single continent, either America or the Americas, but is rather a word used when talking about these two continents as a unit --which isn't a unit anyway. Virtually no one refers to inhabitants of the continents as “Americans”. American(s)is reserved for people from the US (including in South America) Just as Asians doesn’t refer to everyone who lives in the continent of Asia. The demonym "American" stands for a person from the USA. Just as Mexican refers to a person from the USM (United States of Mexico as translated from Spanish).

jobigoud 5y ago
People from the US are estadounidense in Spanish-speaking countries. "American" is always ambiguous and pretty arrogant to think it should be universally understood in other cultures of America to be honest. The way to split the continents is cultural. For example look at the Olympic games logo. The rings represent the five continents, also the ones I learned at school: Europe, Asia, Africa, America, Australia.
- deleted 5y ago
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- mc32 5y ago
  >"People from the US are estadounidense in Spanish-speaking countries." I think that depends on the person. I mostly hear, so and so "es Americano" to refer to Americans. There has NEVER been a case where "Americano" means someone from either SAm or NAm. It's just not used that way. With regards to the Olympics, it's just a logo. You obviously know there is no geographical continent of Europe or Asia but rather Eurasia. The Western Hemisphere is the opposite, there there are two continents North America and South America, there is no continent of The Americas. There are two distinct landmasses. Besides, colloquial and in general speech American refers to people from the US. Only prescriptivists (who typically are anti prescriptivists elsewhere) insists that it refers to people from two different continents. I've heard "norte Americano" to refer to both people from what they sometimes call "Anglo-saxon America" (US and Canada) which seems to map as the opposite of Latin American. It usually excludes Mexicans who are referred to as Mexicano and not as norte americano because they are considered part of LatAm.

tobbob 5y ago

Is there a version of this minus the woke bs?

peterhadlaw 5y ago

Sanity check failed.