3 ms·

Seems like a reasonable change.

flir 3y ago
It's corporate window dressing. It doesn't address any real issue. At best it does nothing, at worst gives a corporation something to point to and say "look! we're doing something!" I will, of course, go along with it precisely because of its inconsequentiality. It's not a hill anyone should be dying on.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  It's actually a great way for corporations to enforce ageism and political correctness. Just bring the person in for an interview, ask him/her to describe OSPF router relationships, and as soon as he/she says "master/slave" you just tick the box that reads "not a good culture fit" and show him/her the door. You didn't even need to inquire about age or political beliefs.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    It does seem like the division of a single group into an in-group and out-group, with a shibboleth to distinguish those groups, is the most tangible effect of these kinds of wording changes.
    - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
      It's interesting, because the same thing is done in the Catholic Church with the liturgy. The liturgy was very stable for about 500 years, but that's not to say that there weren't revisions. Typically there were not a lot of opportunities for the people themselves to really respond. Of course it was all in Latin, and could be deployed anywhere in the world intact without change. Now when the liturgy was translated into the vernacular, it presented the opportunity for a vast machinery of translations. There are hundreds of Catholic Masses in all languages, all translated from Latin, and kept updated on a regular basis. This enables musicians to freshly copyright new tunes at every update and rake in cash at parish expense! So the effect of a regularly updated, vernacular Mass is that sometimes they change the parts that the assembly says. The most drastic and noticeable changes were implemented in 2011, and there have been minor "corrections" since then. As a result, if you go to a wedding or funeral, you can just listen critically and immediately pick out anyone who hasn't been to Mass in N years because they are automatically reciting the old words by rote! Likewise, you can catch a priest who's rusty and not in the habit of using the Missal, because they've made really subtle but critical changes to his words in a few places. (Priests are always supposed to read out of the Missal verbatim.)
      - flir 3y ago
        I don't think there's a subculture that doesn't use jargon/shibboleths as a gatekeeper, and that jargon has to have turnover, otherwise it ceases to be useful (when was the last time you heard "helicopter view"?) Viewed from an anthropological perspective, keeping up with the jargon is just an expected cost of belonging to a subculture, and as an industry we're more guilty than most (look at the sheer amount of new language we coined for Software Patterns, or Agile).

flir 3y ago

It's corporate window dressing. It doesn't address any real issue. At best it does nothing, at worst gives a corporation something to point to and say "look! we're doing something!" I will, of course, go along with it precisely because of its inconsequentiality. It's not a hill anyone should be dying on.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
It's actually a great way for corporations to enforce ageism and political correctness. Just bring the person in for an interview, ask him/her to describe OSPF router relationships, and as soon as he/she says "master/slave" you just tick the box that reads "not a good culture fit" and show him/her the door. You didn't even need to inquire about age or political beliefs.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  It does seem like the division of a single group into an in-group and out-group, with a shibboleth to distinguish those groups, is the most tangible effect of these kinds of wording changes.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    It's interesting, because the same thing is done in the Catholic Church with the liturgy. The liturgy was very stable for about 500 years, but that's not to say that there weren't revisions. Typically there were not a lot of opportunities for the people themselves to really respond. Of course it was all in Latin, and could be deployed anywhere in the world intact without change. Now when the liturgy was translated into the vernacular, it presented the opportunity for a vast machinery of translations. There are hundreds of Catholic Masses in all languages, all translated from Latin, and kept updated on a regular basis. This enables musicians to freshly copyright new tunes at every update and rake in cash at parish expense! So the effect of a regularly updated, vernacular Mass is that sometimes they change the parts that the assembly says. The most drastic and noticeable changes were implemented in 2011, and there have been minor "corrections" since then. As a result, if you go to a wedding or funeral, you can just listen critically and immediately pick out anyone who hasn't been to Mass in N years because they are automatically reciting the old words by rote! Likewise, you can catch a priest who's rusty and not in the habit of using the Missal, because they've made really subtle but critical changes to his words in a few places. (Priests are always supposed to read out of the Missal verbatim.)
    - flir 3y ago
      I don't think there's a subculture that doesn't use jargon/shibboleths as a gatekeeper, and that jargon has to have turnover, otherwise it ceases to be useful (when was the last time you heard "helicopter view"?) Viewed from an anthropological perspective, keeping up with the jargon is just an expected cost of belonging to a subculture, and as an industry we're more guilty than most (look at the sheer amount of new language we coined for Software Patterns, or Agile).