5 ms·

the point still stands though could you please explain to me, a non-native english speaker, why using "mainboard" is better than "motherboard"?

slg 5y ago
It is the same logic as why we switched from "fireman" to "firefighter" or "stewardess" to "fight attendant" decades ago. Because some people find the old word offensive. The only real debate is the size of the "some" and whether that "some" is small enough to ethically ignore.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  Sterwardess doesn't make sense because Stewards are a thing as well. I guess this is just the Actor/Actress debate in this case?
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  The thing is, those substitutions are logical because "fireman" doesn't refer to female firefighters. But "motherboard" is different, because "board" doesn't refer to a person.
  - slg 5y ago
    Perhaps, but this is your opinion. Maybe you are in the "some" for certain words and not others. I am not in the "some" for "motherboard" so I can't tell you exactly why people are offended, but I know they are. Whether the rest of us think someone taking offense is logical doesn't stop them from being offended.
    - fluoridation 5y ago
      I very much doubt anyone is actually offended by the word "motherboard". More likely it's a dumb inductive argument. "Some people are offended by some gendered words => every gendered word might offend someone => every gendered word must be eliminated as a precaution".
      - slg 5y ago
        This is basically a semantic debate, but I guess this all is anyway. I don't disagree with the pattern you are describing, but I would describe it a slightly different way. There are people getting offended on the behalf of other people who potentially might get offended. Even if this second group never materializes or doesn't even exist, that first group is still getting offended on their behalf. Basically I don't believe that "precaution" you mention is an apathetic but cautious person. These changes are more often motivated by someone who thinks "this might offend someone so I will take offense to it too".
      - flippinburgers 5y ago
        The exact same pattern was leveraged against blacklist - a word that has absolutely no connection with the skin color usage. It has been removed by notable projects and people were up in arms talking about it being necessary due to "people being offended". Motherboard. It took me a few moments to guess as to why this is a "problem". Obviously due to the word mother. Let me roll my eyes. Frankly it is completely absurd to be offended about a word that is part of a process that keeps our very species existing. Sadly I would not be surprised at all if there are google employees who are offended on behalf of "people being offended".
    - lbrito 5y ago
      There will be a group offended by anything. People are wild. You can find small groups of people who do and think insane things. We as a society should not try to cater to every possible sensibility. That's a recipe for disaster.
  - verve_rat 5y ago
    Exactly. Mainship instead of mothership? I guess male and female plugs/sockets are off limits now too. I'm tired of this sort of shallow, performative, language policing. I'm (I believe) a socially progressive, inclusive person, but this shit makes me tired. Just fucking leave it alone and spend our collective fucks to give on something that actually matters.
    - anonymoushn 5y ago
      I look forward to the future of convex and concave connectors!
- fallingknife 5y ago
  It's not about the size of "some." It's about their objection being stupid.
sillysaurusx 5y ago
Imagine a future where babies can be incubated in an external enclosure, rather than a womb. This doesn't seem too unlikely. I've been hoping tech would go this way -- We're doing IVF in June, and it's still hit-or-miss whether it'll work. In that future, if someone identifies as nonbinary but still wishes to have a child, neither "mother" nor "father" would accurately describe them. And since a womb isn't required for a baby, there's not necessarily any "mother" (nor "father") in that scenario. That said, I think the argument is "mainboard is better than motherboard for the same reason that denylist is better than blacklist -- the whole point is so that people don't have to be reminded of social issues whenever the word comes up in discussion."
- marton78 5y ago
  "Don't mention the war!"
- jstanley 5y ago
  > there's not necessarily any "mother" (nor "father") in that scenario. Is there not still an egg supplier and a sperm supplier?
  - nicky0 5y ago
    Careful, you're suggesting there might be a meaningful biological difference between the sexes.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  As an african american, I never particularly liked the whole black and white argument (literally in this case) because those words and concepts go beyond western culture and even civilization. "black" in this case isn't referring to me anymore than a black mage is referring to me in DnD (I don't play magical classes). It's from a much more fundamental concept that humans are diurnal creatures that can't see well at night. Or rather, the "black of night". the unknown is scary, night is full of the unknown. This is why every culture has some concept of "black is scary", because we all have this natural fear or discomfort of what we can't see (our strongest sense). If nothing else, maybe we should revisit the language as a whole and its obsession with overloaded homonyms. /rant
ChrisKnott 5y ago
I guess because it's kind of exclusive of fathers and/or stereotypical of mothers as the "family orientated parent".
- deschutes 5y ago
  Find me a reasonable person offended by this terminology and I'll show you an unreasonable person. That connotation doesn't come through at all.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
dodobirdlord 5y ago
Some languages have gendered words as a fundamental grammatical aspect of the language (though since this language aspect evolved out of earlier grammatical distinctions that had nothing to do with “gender”, frequently the gendering of words is kinda random). English doesn’t have grammatical gender, and it has a relatively small set of words in its vocabulary that are specifically gendered. The argument goes that the use of some of this vocabulary is harmful, and that it’s easier to try to move away from using the whole class of gender-specific vocabulary words outside of actually gender-specific scenarios than it is to try to define and keep track of which gendered vocabulary words should be discouraged. Words like “motherboard” are collateral damage of this broader effort to discourage use of terms like “mothering”, which can be used in English to mean both “being mother to”, but also in a metaphorical generic sense as “being responsible for and looking after”, even of things that are not children, and is discouraged in favor of “parenting” or “caretaking”, which have the same implications but without the gendered aspect.
- ushakov 5y ago
  so it's a belief system then?
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  Parenting and caretaking don't have the same connotation as mothering. It seems like people who object to motherboard don't understand analogy?
  - crdrost 5y ago
    If the objection were to parenthood, which is to say if nurtureboard or parentboard were similarly offensive, then I agree this would have been a stupid stupid choice. The problem is that you had a motherboard and daughter boards, those were the accepted terms, and never fatherboard or son boards, never parentboard or child boards. Why were they gendered female in the first place? Because they had “female connections,” which is to say their use is in plugging pins into their sockets. Obviously that is a sexual analogy that did not age particularly well, this idea that a motherboard is the motherboard because you shove stuff into it. So people started replacing with mainboard because it makes more sense...
imgabe 5y ago
mainboard does not even communicate the same concept. A main board might be one of several disconnected boards where it performs the primary function, not necessarily the singular substrate on which all other components are hosted.
spoonjim 5y ago
Because 0.1% of people feel like they are more comfortable adopting the social customs of the opposite sex, and... the culture wars.
peterkelly 5y ago
You used another incorrect word!!! /s > "Avoid referring to people in divisive ways. For example, instead of referring to people as native speakers or non-native speakers of English, consider whether your document needs to discuss this at all" https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation#features-and-users https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation#...

slg 5y ago

It is the same logic as why we switched from "fireman" to "firefighter" or "stewardess" to "fight attendant" decades ago. Because some people find the old word offensive. The only real debate is the size of the "some" and whether that "some" is small enough to ethically ignore.

johnnyanmac 5y ago
Sterwardess doesn't make sense because Stewards are a thing as well. I guess this is just the Actor/Actress debate in this case?
sillysaurusx 5y ago
The thing is, those substitutions are logical because "fireman" doesn't refer to female firefighters. But "motherboard" is different, because "board" doesn't refer to a person.
- slg 5y ago
  Perhaps, but this is your opinion. Maybe you are in the "some" for certain words and not others. I am not in the "some" for "motherboard" so I can't tell you exactly why people are offended, but I know they are. Whether the rest of us think someone taking offense is logical doesn't stop them from being offended.
  - fluoridation 5y ago
    I very much doubt anyone is actually offended by the word "motherboard". More likely it's a dumb inductive argument. "Some people are offended by some gendered words => every gendered word might offend someone => every gendered word must be eliminated as a precaution".
    - slg 5y ago
      This is basically a semantic debate, but I guess this all is anyway. I don't disagree with the pattern you are describing, but I would describe it a slightly different way. There are people getting offended on the behalf of other people who potentially might get offended. Even if this second group never materializes or doesn't even exist, that first group is still getting offended on their behalf. Basically I don't believe that "precaution" you mention is an apathetic but cautious person. These changes are more often motivated by someone who thinks "this might offend someone so I will take offense to it too".
    - flippinburgers 5y ago
      The exact same pattern was leveraged against blacklist - a word that has absolutely no connection with the skin color usage. It has been removed by notable projects and people were up in arms talking about it being necessary due to "people being offended". Motherboard. It took me a few moments to guess as to why this is a "problem". Obviously due to the word mother. Let me roll my eyes. Frankly it is completely absurd to be offended about a word that is part of a process that keeps our very species existing. Sadly I would not be surprised at all if there are google employees who are offended on behalf of "people being offended".
  - lbrito 5y ago
    There will be a group offended by anything. People are wild. You can find small groups of people who do and think insane things. We as a society should not try to cater to every possible sensibility. That's a recipe for disaster.
- verve_rat 5y ago
  Exactly. Mainship instead of mothership? I guess male and female plugs/sockets are off limits now too. I'm tired of this sort of shallow, performative, language policing. I'm (I believe) a socially progressive, inclusive person, but this shit makes me tired. Just fucking leave it alone and spend our collective fucks to give on something that actually matters.
  - anonymoushn 5y ago
    I look forward to the future of convex and concave connectors!
fallingknife 5y ago
It's not about the size of "some." It's about their objection being stupid.

sillysaurusx 5y ago

Imagine a future where babies can be incubated in an external enclosure, rather than a womb. This doesn't seem too unlikely. I've been hoping tech would go this way -- We're doing IVF in June, and it's still hit-or-miss whether it'll work. In that future, if someone identifies as nonbinary but still wishes to have a child, neither "mother" nor "father" would accurately describe them. And since a womb isn't required for a baby, there's not necessarily any "mother" (nor "father") in that scenario. That said, I think the argument is "mainboard is better than motherboard for the same reason that denylist is better than blacklist -- the whole point is so that people don't have to be reminded of social issues whenever the word comes up in discussion."

marton78 5y ago
"Don't mention the war!"
jstanley 5y ago
> there's not necessarily any "mother" (nor "father") in that scenario. Is there not still an egg supplier and a sperm supplier?
- nicky0 5y ago
  Careful, you're suggesting there might be a meaningful biological difference between the sexes.
johnnyanmac 5y ago
As an african american, I never particularly liked the whole black and white argument (literally in this case) because those words and concepts go beyond western culture and even civilization. "black" in this case isn't referring to me anymore than a black mage is referring to me in DnD (I don't play magical classes). It's from a much more fundamental concept that humans are diurnal creatures that can't see well at night. Or rather, the "black of night". the unknown is scary, night is full of the unknown. This is why every culture has some concept of "black is scary", because we all have this natural fear or discomfort of what we can't see (our strongest sense). If nothing else, maybe we should revisit the language as a whole and its obsession with overloaded homonyms. /rant

ChrisKnott 5y ago

I guess because it's kind of exclusive of fathers and/or stereotypical of mothers as the "family orientated parent".

deschutes 5y ago
Find me a reasonable person offended by this terminology and I'll show you an unreasonable person. That connotation doesn't come through at all.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

dodobirdlord 5y ago

Some languages have gendered words as a fundamental grammatical aspect of the language (though since this language aspect evolved out of earlier grammatical distinctions that had nothing to do with “gender”, frequently the gendering of words is kinda random). English doesn’t have grammatical gender, and it has a relatively small set of words in its vocabulary that are specifically gendered. The argument goes that the use of some of this vocabulary is harmful, and that it’s easier to try to move away from using the whole class of gender-specific vocabulary words outside of actually gender-specific scenarios than it is to try to define and keep track of which gendered vocabulary words should be discouraged. Words like “motherboard” are collateral damage of this broader effort to discourage use of terms like “mothering”, which can be used in English to mean both “being mother to”, but also in a metaphorical generic sense as “being responsible for and looking after”, even of things that are not children, and is discouraged in favor of “parenting” or “caretaking”, which have the same implications but without the gendered aspect.

ushakov 5y ago
so it's a belief system then?
pbhjpbhj 5y ago
Parenting and caretaking don't have the same connotation as mothering. It seems like people who object to motherboard don't understand analogy?
- crdrost 5y ago
  If the objection were to parenthood, which is to say if nurtureboard or parentboard were similarly offensive, then I agree this would have been a stupid stupid choice. The problem is that you had a motherboard and daughter boards, those were the accepted terms, and never fatherboard or son boards, never parentboard or child boards. Why were they gendered female in the first place? Because they had “female connections,” which is to say their use is in plugging pins into their sockets. Obviously that is a sexual analogy that did not age particularly well, this idea that a motherboard is the motherboard because you shove stuff into it. So people started replacing with mainboard because it makes more sense...

imgabe 5y ago

mainboard does not even communicate the same concept. A main board might be one of several disconnected boards where it performs the primary function, not necessarily the singular substrate on which all other components are hosted.

spoonjim 5y ago

Because 0.1% of people feel like they are more comfortable adopting the social customs of the opposite sex, and... the culture wars.

peterkelly 5y ago

You used another incorrect word!!! /s > "Avoid referring to people in divisive ways. For example, instead of referring to people as native speakers or non-native speakers of English, consider whether your document needs to discuss this at all" https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation#features-and-users https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation#...