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It sounds like you're describing the phenomenon of the "Euphemism Treadmill" [1], the canonical example of which is the previously-acceptable term "retarded".

1: http://englishcowpath.blogspot.com/2011/06/euphemism-treadmi...

Oh my, you're right. I read the blank slate about 10 years ago and must have just internalized that idea.

I see and hear "autistic" used as a slur now, too.

It might well be. It is, sadly, very frequently used as an insult (at least on the Internet, anyway).

Generally cruel people will find the word that maximizes cruelty. Since it is more insulting to claim that someone has 'clinical and official' whatever than to use the time worn insult version of the same word, cruel people will constantly chase whatever the most official version is.

To be clear, the goal of an insult is not to use some bad word, but to claim something that will hurt the person being insulted. Even when I was in school I remember 'retarded' being used almost always a replacement for 'absurd', and people being insulted with words like 'special ed' or 'special eddy'.

Not that I condone those things, but the point is that the insult was to say 'you are like that group of people' where 'that group of people' can be any group that is outside of the in-group. You can see this on message boards today where people are accused of being 'normies', etc.

I believe that you can call the slowing down of progress "retardation" still, just not where it applies to human beings.

And that's where I feel this project is mistaken. Because it would flag any use of "retard" even if it were in reference to "flame retarding bromides" or an innocuous phrase like "the pace of development has slowly retarded" or "the tempo retards in the last four measures of the piece".

Much like a spell-checker or Word's grammar checker screw this up, yes. I'm not sure it can be helped much.

Spell checkers et al. don't check subjective properties like tone or offensiveness. (And where it gets subjective, they would rather create a false negative than a false positive.) It works rather well.

> Spell checkers et al. don't check subjective properties like tone or offensiveness.

That's true. But grammar checkers screw up rather often for the same reason things like `alex` would: understanding context as a computer is quite hard.

It's been my experience that communties generally work best when individuals are considerate towards one another. Some level of sensitivity towards avoding terms that cause discomfort to others goes a long way.

> X is used widely, and never with any intention to hurt, marginalize, offend, bother, or in any way cause any trouble. It's been used righteously with pure intentions and loving hearts.

Do you have an example of a term that falls into this category? I'm interested in words or phrases that have fallen out of use; especially ones that are "used righteously with pure intentions and loving hearts".

Well, how about the example from the page here.

It says that 'boogyman' is potentially offensive because it refers to gender. So presumably if I am not caught up on a story, and I ask who the 'bad guy' is in the story, that is offensive because 'guy' implies maleness?

That whole line of reasoning could not be more absurd. Nobody has ever said 'bad guy' or 'boogyman' with the intention of somehow excluding fictional women from engaging in immoral fictional acts, or diminishing anyone.

If sensitive people go along, however, pretty soon anyone with any sense will avoid saying 'bad guy' because someone said it is bad to say that, and nobody wants other people to think we're not considerate.

> potentially offensive

The problem is not that it is offensive. It's very unlikely anyone would find it to be so. The problem is that it normalises maleness.

> Nobody has ever said 'bad guy' or 'boogyman' with the intention of somehow excluding fictional women from engaging in immoral fictional acts, or diminishing anyone.

It doesn't matter what your intent is. Using 'he' and 'man' everywhere normalises men and excludes people of a different gender.

> pretty soon anyone with any sense will avoid saying 'bad guy'

Well, yes. What's wrong with that? If there's a superior alternative, what's wrong if people start using it exclusively?

> If there's a superior alternative,

It's not superior. Out of almost half a billion English speakers, probably a very tiny percentage 'highly educated' people would ever even think that this is a topic someone might have an opinion about.

Everyone else, from small children on up, would just explain to you that a 'bad guy' can be a boy or a girl. It's not normalizing maleness, you are the one bringing an incorrect definition of -man or -guy, and that incorrect definition, which you insist on using despite being wrong both compared to the dictionary definition and long standing usage among native speakers, is what implies maleness.

This reminds me of the people who try to claim (hopefully tongue in cheek?) that history somehow encodes maleness because it has the word 'his' in it.

EDIT: http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/ba... http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bad+guy http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bad%20guy

You could go all day, no dictionary assigns any sex (in fact, most even make it clear that a 'bad guy' can be non-human).

> It's not superior.

Why is a non-exclusionary alternative not superior? If it conveys the same meaning without being exclusionary, why is it not better? It's only not superior if you think being exclusionary isn't a quality, or utterly disregard its importance.

> Out of almost half a billion English speakers, probably a very tiny percentage 'highly educated' people would ever even think that this is a topic someone might have an opinion about.

Argumentum ad populum. Even so, you seem to be projecting: how do you know people actually agree with you?

> Everyone else, from small children on up, would just explain to you that a 'bad guy' can be a boy or a girl.

Would they? Have you gone out and asked them?

'tis true, 'guy' is sometimes rather generic, so they might say so. It's not the best example. But until you actually go out and ask, we don't really know. Err on the side of caution.

(I should note that while 'guy' may be generic in some contexts, this is only because maleness is considered generic in our culture, so it would still be problematic in that case.)

> This reminds me of the people who try to claim (hopefully tongue in cheek?) that history somehow encodes maleness because it has the word 'his' in it.

It's either tongue-in-cheek or a misunderstanding of etymology. Using his-story can be a political statement about how history as we chronicle it has largely focussed on men's achievements to the exclusion of others', though.

I don't think I do need to do a study to determine this.

I have been persuaded that you might.

You are claiming that we should 'err on the side of caution'. Ignoring the false dilemma, first we must decide what that even means. Since you are proposing that we should encourage millions of people to change the way they refer to villians in fiction, I think it would certainly fall to you to provide evidence that such a sweeping change is worthwhile, and more importantly, worth costs, including opportunity cost, since we could have spent that time and effort on lots of other things.

Also consider the blow-back which may or may not exist. By exposing such a seemingly trivial preference as 'bad guy' vs 'bad person' or the non human-assuming 'bad entity' (although entity may not be inclusive to hive-minds like the Borg, or more emergent Gaia like forces, so the side of caution may just be the British 'baddie', but -ie is a diminutive, and who knows who might come out of the word-work to take offense at that, short people for a start). By having such a trivial belief, you may well inadvertently have people then conclude that all your beliefs are that trivial, academic, and generally bizarre, and then have them discount your other ideas. So certainly we need to determine if it is more cautious to 'keep our powder dry' before we leap in and insist that there is some harm being done, especially since we've really not established the harm to begin with.

Anyway, it's been fun arguing with you. I hope you enjoy the rest of grad school :)

Thank you so much. I'm not religious but this discussion almost makes me wish I were, so I could start praying for this guy not to ever have to face the world outside academia :)

Language is not merely academic. It permeates every aspect of life and apparently 'trivial' things often aren't in the grander scale of things.

Be cautious in what you dismiss.

Hacker News is a mere casual discussion forum, I'm not having nor intend to have a serious academic debate with you. I just pointed out a few holes in what you said.

A lot of people have much more time and patience than I do and could argue the case for gender-neutral language better. There are studies you could read if you're curious.

I will say one more thing, though: few things are ever as trivial as they appear. Death by a thousand cuts.

(I hope you're enjoying your life, even if you did end that with an insult.)

Your view isn't backed up by studies done on implicit bias.

It doesn't matter what your intent is. Using 'he' and 'man' everywhere normalises men and excludes people of a different gender.

Then why would 'she' (the PC/feminist recommended alternative) be any more legitimate ?

> Then why would 'she' (the PC/feminist recommended alternative) be any more legitimate ?

Some people use 'she', which has the advantage that it tries to normalise women instead (not kind to others, but it makes you think, at least), but it's still exclusionary, yes. I'm not sure if it's fair to say it's the 'PC/feminist recommended alternative'. Certainly some advocate it, I don't know if they're a majority (I don't think so?). I know that the tool under discussion, `alex`, uses gender-neutral language ('they') instead. I also use 'they'.

> It says that 'boogyman' is potentially offensive because it refers to gender.

Which is simply factually incorrect. "Boogeyman" doesn't refer to gender (or sex) at all. Like the "-man" in "woman", the "-man" that "Boogeyman" was partially derived from meant "person" -- a meaning that "man" had in English long before it acquired the alternate definition of "male human" (and even longer before that became the dominant use of the standalone word "man".)

Etymologically, yes. However, the word and suffix "man" in modern English means a "male human".

> perfectly considerate and inoffensive for quite a long time

No, they weren't considerate and inoffensive. You just didn't know they weren't.

If you don't speak much to gay people, you wouldn't realise certain terms (like, historically, 'gay') were offensive. If you don't speak much to disabled people, you wouldn't realise 'cripple' was offensive. If you didn't speak much to trans people, you wouldn't realise 'tr$&%y' was a slur.

> never with any intention to hurt, marginalize, offend, bother, or in any way cause any trouble

Intention is nice and all, but effect is what actually matters. People will be kinder on you if you didn't intend to be hurtful, but it ultimately doesn't matter if you're consistently actually being hurtful without good reason.

> enforcing softer language will inject love and understanding into people's hearts

Who thinks it will? The idea of considerate language is to avoid normalising things that are unreasonable (not all firefighters are male, don't use 'fireman'), or avoid causing hurt to people (at best a gay person would be irritated by a certain word beginning with f, at worst deeply hurt).

> they distract from things that actually matter to the quality of people's lives

Avoiding discrimination DOES matter to people's lives. Maybe it doesn't to you. But you should maybe listen to the people this actually affects, who may actually appreciate these efforts.

Please don't put words in my mouth.

Some words are offensive and people should not use them.

However, other words aren't offensive, have never been before, and don't need to become so.

Intention is everything. If there is some word, and literally nobody has ever used it from a place of hate, then taking offense at that word is wrong and a mental pathology.

I totally agree with you about words used by some to express hate and other nasty intentions.

So in your example, 'tr$&%y' is a nasty slur some people use. Everyone should stop saying 'tr$&%y'! I'm very much NOT saying that an innocent person can say 'tr$&%y'.

I am saying that if you have a word like 'boogyman', what is the point of trying to issue some kind of warning that you should really say 'boogyperson'? Are there actually some kind of non-male boogy's that we are somehow excluding?

> Some words are offensive and people should not use them.

> However, other words aren't offensive, have never been before, and don't need to become so.

Not all the words `alex` deals with are offensive, though, but inconsiderate in other ways. I'm not sure if you're saying they all are supposed to be offensive, but I'm assuming you are.

Also, which words are you referring to which aren't offensive? It's all very well talking in the abstract, but without actually defining this you're making statements that are essentially all things to all people.

> Intention is everything.

Intention does matter somewhat, but only somewhat. If you repeatedly use offensive language, without good reason, after being warned about its effects, perhaps you should stop.

And unintentional effects, while you didn't intend them, are still very much real and you should still acknowledge them.

People who feel they are doing the right thing can still cause harm. That they felt it was right doesn't completely absolve them.

Edit: By the way, are you sure expanding your comments after they've been replied to is a good idea? This makes it look like the people who've replied to you have ignored points you've made.

> Intention is everything. If there is some word, and literally nobody has ever used it from a place of hate, then taking offense at that word is wrong and a mental pathology.

Do you have any examples from the submitted project?

That was an example from the project.

>>> 1:5-1:14 warning `boogeyman` may be insensitive, use `boogey` instead

Wait, you made all those posts just because of that one fucking word?

The inclusion of that word is extremely telling. Someone who thinks the word "boogeyman" is exclusionary or otherwise harmful is either completely unfamiliar with normal English usage, is not quite right in the head, or is attempting to enforce some kind of fringe agenda. Whichever one it is, they are not someone you want to hand control of your language over to.

You realise this project just flags things that you might want to think about? You're not handing control over to anyone. You can just ignore the flags.

Well, I can also just not use the software at all, if it's written by someone so goofy that they think "boogeyman" is an offensive word.

Or at least, I can avoid using the software until Github or Reddit or somebody gets bullied into adding it to their site backend. Then things get awkward.

As I've pointed out in other places, the thing about that word/words like it which would make it/them 'inconsiderate' is not offense, so it's an invalid example.

My main concern with the word policing is for people who have been using a common term while it was not offensive, later being deemed as insensitive for having used the term.

For example if using "slave/master" terminology becomes widely accepted as insensitive, in the future someone may look through my twitter history or something and find that I had used that term, even though at the time of writing no one had considered that term insensitive.

> My main concern with the word policing is for people who have been using a common term while it was not offensive, later being deemed as insensitive for having used the term.

This might happen occasionally with words that become offensive, but I'd argue a lot of such words that "were not offensive" actually were, it's just the author was oblivious. In such cases, you'd hopefully be able to argue that the author was unaware.

Although some people might feign ignorance as an excuse when they very definitely knew what they were saying.

> For example if using "slave/master" terminology becomes widely accepted as insensitive [...]

> [...] even though at the time of writing no one had considered that term insensitive.

Well, it always has been insensitive, but the vast bulk of the tech industry has been people who've not experienced slavery (or didn't consider the implications for those who have), so they were oblivious.

> in the future someone may look through my twitter history or something and find that I had used that term

Well, you might not have realised. Someone might call you a monster, but I think people would be somewhat forgiving if you hadn't yet been warned.

(This does depend on severity, though. With some words, obviously it's impossible to argue you couldn't have known.)

> Someone might call you a monster, but I think people would be somewhat forgiving if you hadn't yet been warned.

First off, if you think that the sort of folks who make up online mobs are inclined to be forgiving under any circumstance, please let me be the first person to welcome you to the Internet. You're going to be surprised by a lot of things during your stay here.

But more importantly: "warned"? Who gave these people the authority to "warn" people about what vocabulary they use? And do other small and frequently mocked subgroups of society, like, oh, say, Mormons, or Southern Baptists, also get to "warn" people about insensitive remarks, and have their warnings automatically obeyed? If not, why not?