7 ms·

This level of language policing puzzles me. It literally wants to replace 'mother' and 'father' with 'parent', 'son' with 'child'. I thought we wanted the world

This level of language policing puzzles me. It literally wants to replace 'mother' and 'father' with 'parent', 'son' with 'child'. I thought we wanted the world to be more tolerant, not more authoritarian.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gjsman-1000 5y ago
The bot's dumbest mistake so far was when it replaced "mother" and "father" objects in a Rust struct with "person" and "person". That won't compile...
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  I think trying to replace "man" as in manual with "person" was stupider.
- ziml77 5y ago
  The dumbest mistake was changing pronouns that refer to specific people. So much for respecting people's own pronouns!
- edflsafoiewq 5y ago
  I like that it replaces French "son" with "child".
woodruffw 5y ago
In what meaningful sense of the word is a third-party, anonymously-created (and apparently buggy) bot "authoritarian"? This reeks of artificial engagement. HN should avoid buying into it.
- sadmanycases 5y ago
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    Nobody is stopping you from thinking the word "man" or "woman." There's no point in making such a ridiculous claim. This is clearly just a badly programmed bot. However, if you look at one of the (less) buggy PRs it submitted, you'll find an actually helpful change[1]: replacing gendered pronouns with neutral ones makes sense in the context of documentation, wherever that documentation is in fact gender-neutral in disposition. [1]: https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/43441 https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/43441
    - starkd 5y ago
      Controlling language is how you control thoughts. It's the chief function of propaganda.
    - mongol 5y ago
      It is not badly programmed. It is badly intentioned.
    - blindmute 5y ago
      "They" is not a gender neutral singular pronoun to begin with, so the entire concept is wrong
      - woodruffw 5y ago
        Sure it is. If it's good enough for the Bard, I think it's good enough for you and me[1]. [1]: https://phys.org/news/2020-01-chronicles-history-gender-neutral-pronouns-shakespeare.html https://phys.org/news/2020-01-chronicles-history-gender-neut...
        blindmute 5y ago
        Merriam-Webster chose "they" as its 2019 Word of the Year based on the number of dictionary lookups, and the singular "they" was added to its online dictionary in September. In other words, the dictionary added it 3 years ago due to political pressure. It's never been correct English, and it still isn't.
- xeromal 5y ago
  You don't want to wait to the last minute to stop something. If you see an accident forming from afar, you start reacting now. This bot may be a "joke" but it represents the thought police and the author should be sternly reprimanded.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > This bot may be a "joke" but it represents the thought police It represents the thought police in exactly the same way that anyone having any opinion represents that.
  - maxbond 5y ago
    So, what appears to have happened is, someone who views political correctness as stifling made a troll bot to paint their opposition as absurd. And you are asking us to treat this as a representation of a real threat to free thought, and not only to respond, but to respond as it were an emergency or natural disaster. Do you hear how absurd that sounds to my ears?
- cato_the_elder 5y ago
  Well, if we pretend that it's just this single instance, it probably isn't. But this is part of a cultural phenomenon, unless you want to argue that wokism doesn't exist.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    This is what I meant by artificial engagement: we're now in the "complain about vague cultural phenomena" segment of the program. Besides, there's nothing particularly wrong with cooking on a Wok.
    - cato_the_elder 5y ago
      > vague cultural phenomena It's not vague at all. > Besides, there's nothing particularly wrong with cooking on a Wok. Lol, I had to look up what a wok is. Blessings of learning English as a second language.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    [flagged]
    - smegsicle 5y ago
      > reflects no coherent ideology it sure is incoherent, but it sure is persistent
    - cato_the_elder 5y ago
      That's certainly an argument you can make. I kinda agree with what you imply about the lack of logical coherence, but unfortunately that's not necessary for cultural movements. Don't you agree that there's a relationship between having pronouns in the bio, reading Ibram X. Kendi, being "intersectional", believing words are violence, and sporting purple hair?
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > I kinda agree with what you imply about the lack of logical coherence I didn't imply anything, I explicitly stated that the term “wokism” as currently used, doesn't refer to either an actual ideology, cultural phenomenon, or even a set of ideas or groups of people more connected than that they are things the dominant faction of the political Right disagrees with at the moment of the use of the label. > Don't you agree that there's a relationship between having pronouns in the bio, reading Ibram X. Kendi, being "intersectional", believing words are violence, and sporting purple hair? No, I don't. Believing (certain uses of) words are violence seems to be common across the political spectrum, though which uses of which words varies, purple hair is pretty orthogonal to politics (as is the more common feature used in this context, blue hair), intersectional isn't something a person can be, and while the first two things do correlate with political positions the Right opposes they (and the political positions they each correlate strongly with) don't correlate very strongly with each other. (In fact, that's a perennial complaint of the group that represents the intersection of those two communities.)
canbus 5y ago
it's a never-ending rabbithole. 'Guardian' is probably more inclusive than 'parent', even... What I really want to know is how whoever is trying to force it deals with languages with grammatical genders.
- grishka 5y ago
  My native language is Russian. There are three grammatical genders, but only two of them are used for sentient beings, to talk about someone in the neutral gender is derogatory af (not that it stops people — I've seen one person call themselves "оно"). Other than this extremely rare occasion, everyone is 100% okay with using gendered words because those are the only ones we have. Hell, we don't even have the word "sibling", it's either a brother or a sister. But we do have another similar phenomenon going on. Feminitives. It's when some people assign the female gender to words that don't have a female form, or that do have one but it's not cringy enough. So автор becomes авторка, врач becomes врачка (instead of врачиха), учитель becomes учителька (instead of учительница), and so on.
  - klibertp 5y ago
    That "sibling" thing is quite interesting actually. In Polish, we have "brat" and "siostra" for brother and sister, and we have "rodzeństwo" for siblings (plural), but there is no singular form in the language. Is it similar in Russian? On the other hand, "autor" and "autorka" are normal forms; same for "lekarz" and "lekarka", "nauczyciel" and "nauczycielka". These seem to be equivalent to the shorter forms you list. I'm not sure how to translate your longer forms, "nauczycielniczka"? There's no such word. Interesting to see that different languages can have perfectly opposite grammar rules, even if the words are similar and the grammar also shares some similarities in other areas :)
    - grishka 5y ago
      > Is it similar in Russian? Nope, no equivalent to "sibling" at all, not even plural. If you want to say "siblings", you say "братья и сёстры". edit: "родня" might be kinda like "rodzeństwo", but it's not just siblings, it's relatives in general. > I'm not sure how to translate your longer forms, "nauczycielniczka"? There's no such word. "Учительница" (or short slang form "училка") is the correct feminine form found in dictionaries. "Учителька" is the cringy one coined by feminists. They both mean "female teacher", but apparently the correct one is somehow worse or not modern enough? I don't know.
sadmanycases 5y ago
Power Politics suck and now it’s hard to distinguish genuine concern from authoritarian horseshit.
535188B17C93743 5y ago
The thing is, sometimes specificity is required (and helpful). Nothing about gender neutrality is inherently more inclusive IMO. And it's annoying to correct colloquialisms like "guys" as if it's meant with ill intent instead of just being a part of our collective vernacular for DECADES.
slothtrop 5y ago
Remember when "tone policing" was a buzzword? As a way of saying "don't criticize my snark or vitriol", i.e. the language used.
sam36 5y ago
Well everyone has a preference. Personally, I don't really care about my pronouns. But my preferred adjectives are 'smart', 'clever', 'clean', and 'elegant'. Please only refer to me using those.
silicon2401 5y ago
Political correctness can't succeed without authoritarian control
maxbond 5y ago
This isn't (sincere) policing, it's a troll account. Let's not take the bait. There are people (myself among them) who would like us to start using "main" instead of "master" and "allowlist" instead of "whitelist", but there is not a preponderance of people who think "boyfriend" is problematic or that "consort" is it's PC equivalent.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- redmen 5y ago
  I still don't understand why changing the language to main makes society better in any way except to make us feel like we are making progress and hiding the fact that we are not. Maybe it causes us to pat ourselves on the back and not actually deal with the infected roots of our culture and societies? Whitelist may be a bit different. I understand that language shapes how we think, but master seems like it would trigger people who have a but of a victim mentality. It's like the word dick, it has a meaning outside of genitals, and if all we can think about is genitals when the word is spoken maybe the problem lies a bit deeper than the word itself. I don't know.. with whitelist and blacklist I could see how unconsciously that could cause people to see black as bad and white as good. But still. Everything has tradeoffs and I also believe that Obama led to Trump. Too much change too quickly leads to backlash and the pendulum swinging violently in the other direction. This increases polarization. I think the solution is more likely not in trying to force our language to change, but is to change our technologies and culture into one that promotes empathy, listening and understanding, and for us to count our blessings instead of running around seeing who can be the better victim, which as a non-american, is what USA looks like to me. If anything the language is more of a symptom of culture than the other way around, even though I agree there is a bidirectional relationship. Hormones change our thoughts more than our thoughts change our hormones, even though there is a bidirection there as well. But to me, to attempt to change culture through language is going to be as effective as trying to will ourselves out of anxiety and depression. I wouldn't be surprised if our generation simply feels powerless in this world. We face a lot of issues ranging from inequality to climate change, and since those issues seem so depressing and insurmountable instead we go on a war against what we feel like we can change, for example words, and then justify to ourselves that this is actually making enough of a difference to steer the ship. But is there any proof of that? All I see is feelings-based decision making without any actual evidence. Again, aside from blacklist vs whitelist which might actually have some substance to its argument.
glouwbug 5y ago
HN doesn’t do April Fools very well I see
nucleogenesis 5y ago
Ah yes the classic authoritarianism of suggesting that you use words inclusive of every kind of person… the horror. It literally wants to replace gender specific language with gender neutral language it’s literally like 1930s Germany… jfc
- SllX 5y ago
  1930s Germany is not the low-water mark for authoritarian thoughts and actions. You can get to authoritarianism long before you get to actual Nazism.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  so what don't you do that in all your writings, code, etc and educate others. You won't get anyone to do it by nagging others or trying to get the government to impose gender neutrality into everything.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

gjsman-1000 5y ago

The bot's dumbest mistake so far was when it replaced "mother" and "father" objects in a Rust struct with "person" and "person". That won't compile...

nonameiguess 5y ago
I think trying to replace "man" as in manual with "person" was stupider.
ziml77 5y ago
The dumbest mistake was changing pronouns that refer to specific people. So much for respecting people's own pronouns!
edflsafoiewq 5y ago
I like that it replaces French "son" with "child".

woodruffw 5y ago

In what meaningful sense of the word is a third-party, anonymously-created (and apparently buggy) bot "authoritarian"? This reeks of artificial engagement. HN should avoid buying into it.

sadmanycases 5y ago
- woodruffw 5y ago
  Nobody is stopping you from thinking the word "man" or "woman." There's no point in making such a ridiculous claim. This is clearly just a badly programmed bot. However, if you look at one of the (less) buggy PRs it submitted, you'll find an actually helpful change[1]: replacing gendered pronouns with neutral ones makes sense in the context of documentation, wherever that documentation is in fact gender-neutral in disposition. [1]: https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/43441 https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/43441
  - starkd 5y ago
    Controlling language is how you control thoughts. It's the chief function of propaganda.
  - mongol 5y ago
    It is not badly programmed. It is badly intentioned.
  - blindmute 5y ago
    "They" is not a gender neutral singular pronoun to begin with, so the entire concept is wrong
    - woodruffw 5y ago
      Sure it is. If it's good enough for the Bard, I think it's good enough for you and me[1]. [1]: https://phys.org/news/2020-01-chronicles-history-gender-neutral-pronouns-shakespeare.html https://phys.org/news/2020-01-chronicles-history-gender-neut...
      - blindmute 5y ago
        Merriam-Webster chose "they" as its 2019 Word of the Year based on the number of dictionary lookups, and the singular "they" was added to its online dictionary in September. In other words, the dictionary added it 3 years ago due to political pressure. It's never been correct English, and it still isn't.
xeromal 5y ago
You don't want to wait to the last minute to stop something. If you see an accident forming from afar, you start reacting now. This bot may be a "joke" but it represents the thought police and the author should be sternly reprimanded.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > This bot may be a "joke" but it represents the thought police It represents the thought police in exactly the same way that anyone having any opinion represents that.
- maxbond 5y ago
  So, what appears to have happened is, someone who views political correctness as stifling made a troll bot to paint their opposition as absurd. And you are asking us to treat this as a representation of a real threat to free thought, and not only to respond, but to respond as it were an emergency or natural disaster. Do you hear how absurd that sounds to my ears?
cato_the_elder 5y ago
Well, if we pretend that it's just this single instance, it probably isn't. But this is part of a cultural phenomenon, unless you want to argue that wokism doesn't exist.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  This is what I meant by artificial engagement: we're now in the "complain about vague cultural phenomena" segment of the program. Besides, there's nothing particularly wrong with cooking on a Wok.
  - cato_the_elder 5y ago
    > vague cultural phenomena It's not vague at all. > Besides, there's nothing particularly wrong with cooking on a Wok. Lol, I had to look up what a wok is. Blessings of learning English as a second language.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - smegsicle 5y ago
    > reflects no coherent ideology it sure is incoherent, but it sure is persistent
  - cato_the_elder 5y ago
    That's certainly an argument you can make. I kinda agree with what you imply about the lack of logical coherence, but unfortunately that's not necessary for cultural movements. Don't you agree that there's a relationship between having pronouns in the bio, reading Ibram X. Kendi, being "intersectional", believing words are violence, and sporting purple hair?
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > I kinda agree with what you imply about the lack of logical coherence I didn't imply anything, I explicitly stated that the term “wokism” as currently used, doesn't refer to either an actual ideology, cultural phenomenon, or even a set of ideas or groups of people more connected than that they are things the dominant faction of the political Right disagrees with at the moment of the use of the label. > Don't you agree that there's a relationship between having pronouns in the bio, reading Ibram X. Kendi, being "intersectional", believing words are violence, and sporting purple hair? No, I don't. Believing (certain uses of) words are violence seems to be common across the political spectrum, though which uses of which words varies, purple hair is pretty orthogonal to politics (as is the more common feature used in this context, blue hair), intersectional isn't something a person can be, and while the first two things do correlate with political positions the Right opposes they (and the political positions they each correlate strongly with) don't correlate very strongly with each other. (In fact, that's a perennial complaint of the group that represents the intersection of those two communities.)

canbus 5y ago

it's a never-ending rabbithole. 'Guardian' is probably more inclusive than 'parent', even... What I really want to know is how whoever is trying to force it deals with languages with grammatical genders.

grishka 5y ago
My native language is Russian. There are three grammatical genders, but only two of them are used for sentient beings, to talk about someone in the neutral gender is derogatory af (not that it stops people — I've seen one person call themselves "оно"). Other than this extremely rare occasion, everyone is 100% okay with using gendered words because those are the only ones we have. Hell, we don't even have the word "sibling", it's either a brother or a sister. But we do have another similar phenomenon going on. Feminitives. It's when some people assign the female gender to words that don't have a female form, or that do have one but it's not cringy enough. So автор becomes авторка, врач becomes врачка (instead of врачиха), учитель becomes учителька (instead of учительница), and so on.
- klibertp 5y ago
  That "sibling" thing is quite interesting actually. In Polish, we have "brat" and "siostra" for brother and sister, and we have "rodzeństwo" for siblings (plural), but there is no singular form in the language. Is it similar in Russian? On the other hand, "autor" and "autorka" are normal forms; same for "lekarz" and "lekarka", "nauczyciel" and "nauczycielka". These seem to be equivalent to the shorter forms you list. I'm not sure how to translate your longer forms, "nauczycielniczka"? There's no such word. Interesting to see that different languages can have perfectly opposite grammar rules, even if the words are similar and the grammar also shares some similarities in other areas :)
  - grishka 5y ago
    > Is it similar in Russian? Nope, no equivalent to "sibling" at all, not even plural. If you want to say "siblings", you say "братья и сёстры". edit: "родня" might be kinda like "rodzeństwo", but it's not just siblings, it's relatives in general. > I'm not sure how to translate your longer forms, "nauczycielniczka"? There's no such word. "Учительница" (or short slang form "училка") is the correct feminine form found in dictionaries. "Учителька" is the cringy one coined by feminists. They both mean "female teacher", but apparently the correct one is somehow worse or not modern enough? I don't know.

sadmanycases 5y ago

Power Politics suck and now it’s hard to distinguish genuine concern from authoritarian horseshit.

535188B17C93743 5y ago

The thing is, sometimes specificity is required (and helpful). Nothing about gender neutrality is inherently more inclusive IMO. And it's annoying to correct colloquialisms like "guys" as if it's meant with ill intent instead of just being a part of our collective vernacular for DECADES.

slothtrop 5y ago

Remember when "tone policing" was a buzzword? As a way of saying "don't criticize my snark or vitriol", i.e. the language used.

sam36 5y ago

Well everyone has a preference. Personally, I don't really care about my pronouns. But my preferred adjectives are 'smart', 'clever', 'clean', and 'elegant'. Please only refer to me using those.

silicon2401 5y ago

Political correctness can't succeed without authoritarian control

maxbond 5y ago

This isn't (sincere) policing, it's a troll account. Let's not take the bait. There are people (myself among them) who would like us to start using "main" instead of "master" and "allowlist" instead of "whitelist", but there is not a preponderance of people who think "boyfriend" is problematic or that "consort" is it's PC equivalent.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
redmen 5y ago
I still don't understand why changing the language to main makes society better in any way except to make us feel like we are making progress and hiding the fact that we are not. Maybe it causes us to pat ourselves on the back and not actually deal with the infected roots of our culture and societies? Whitelist may be a bit different. I understand that language shapes how we think, but master seems like it would trigger people who have a but of a victim mentality. It's like the word dick, it has a meaning outside of genitals, and if all we can think about is genitals when the word is spoken maybe the problem lies a bit deeper than the word itself. I don't know.. with whitelist and blacklist I could see how unconsciously that could cause people to see black as bad and white as good. But still. Everything has tradeoffs and I also believe that Obama led to Trump. Too much change too quickly leads to backlash and the pendulum swinging violently in the other direction. This increases polarization. I think the solution is more likely not in trying to force our language to change, but is to change our technologies and culture into one that promotes empathy, listening and understanding, and for us to count our blessings instead of running around seeing who can be the better victim, which as a non-american, is what USA looks like to me. If anything the language is more of a symptom of culture than the other way around, even though I agree there is a bidirectional relationship. Hormones change our thoughts more than our thoughts change our hormones, even though there is a bidirection there as well. But to me, to attempt to change culture through language is going to be as effective as trying to will ourselves out of anxiety and depression. I wouldn't be surprised if our generation simply feels powerless in this world. We face a lot of issues ranging from inequality to climate change, and since those issues seem so depressing and insurmountable instead we go on a war against what we feel like we can change, for example words, and then justify to ourselves that this is actually making enough of a difference to steer the ship. But is there any proof of that? All I see is feelings-based decision making without any actual evidence. Again, aside from blacklist vs whitelist which might actually have some substance to its argument.

glouwbug 5y ago

HN doesn’t do April Fools very well I see

nucleogenesis 5y ago

Ah yes the classic authoritarianism of suggesting that you use words inclusive of every kind of person… the horror. It literally wants to replace gender specific language with gender neutral language it’s literally like 1930s Germany… jfc

SllX 5y ago
1930s Germany is not the low-water mark for authoritarian thoughts and actions. You can get to authoritarianism long before you get to actual Nazism.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
so what don't you do that in all your writings, code, etc and educate others. You won't get anyone to do it by nagging others or trying to get the government to impose gender neutrality into everything.