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Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

There's a weird effect where people become disgruntled with the current terminology because its offensive/demeaning and come up with new words to take their place.

Thus Personnel became Human Resources.

But often the new words are, with the passage of time, clearly just as, or more offensive than their predecessors. I mean, "Human Resources"?!! WTF! Are people really just "resources"? To me, Personnel sounds way friendlier.

Another one is around disability. We would never describe someone today as retarded. Yet really, is disabled any better? I'd rather be retarded (as in, slowed down a little) than disabled (completely stopped).

[close to my heart: we write HR software :)]

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Such process is called Euphemism treadmill [1].

From Wikipedia article on Intellectual disability [2] there is a list of historical medical terms. Nowadays used in offensive manner are: Cretin, Idiot, Imbecile, Moron, Retard. Same will probably happen (or already happened in some cases) with Disabled.

Probably same process takes place for many corporate terms. I observed this in my time at Samsung when internal organisation for CSR [3] changed name from POSITIVE_ADJECTIVE Workplace to New Management Committee.

I am through most of my career a C++ programmer and have personal interest in C/Unix programming. For one project I was working on JavaScript code base with Web developers. I've seen different terminology used for same things. When you study a bit of history or historical code bases then you will also see that terminology changed. I could say that web developers are reinventing a wheel and terminology with it, but every generation seems to do this again and again. It probably is related to the same mechanism. It must be often easier to name things than to learn their previously assigned names. Mostly because you don't know what to look for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism_treadmill

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_disability#Termin...

[3] Corporate Social Responsibility

It's no longer Human Resources at my current company. It's now Human Capital Management. They've also had the IT dept move us from logging into the network with traditional usernames (i.e., "bob.smith"), to employee numbers (77332).

I'm waiting for them to drop the "Human." I'd like to be referred to as a generic "Carbon-based labor unit" or some such.

7 of 12, Floor 3, Unimatrix 01.

Carbon Organic Generic Worker or COG for short.

As someone who is disabled and when I was younger was called retarded, I want to be called disabled. For one, people have a particular way of saying retarded that's very insulting. I was okay with the traditional term at the time, handicapped. That describes things in a far less insulting fashion.

People tended to use retarded as referring to one's mental abilities and assumed that if you have a physical disability, you have a mental one. That was the biggest problem with retarded.

> People tended to use retarded as referring to one's mental abilities

Isn't that what it means? Applying it to something physical just seems wrong.

People often assumed that if you had something physical, you had something mental as well.

Personnel want replaced because it was offensive to employees they deal with, it was replaced because people in the field wanted to more recognition within organizations, and being seen as managing important assets was seen as a way to gain that recognition.

Why was it offensive?

I'm saying it wasn't offensive, the issue was unrelated to that.

Small typo in your original post: I think you said want instead of wasn't. That may have led to some confusion.

I agree about HR! What an annoying term. But, unlike "the r-word", which has lots of history of being used as a direct insult and slur meant to be hurtful, "disability" has quite some time of history as use for political organizing and as a political identity. So while I would actually describe myself as having some physical impairments (such as not being able to walk much) I also would say I am disabled, as a social and political identity. No matter if I mean something different by it than people might think as they use the word to describe me, because it is a point of struggle. Hope that makes sense. It is super interesting how and why people shift the meanings of words!

I wouldn't mind being called a resource if it was short for "one who is resourceful" but we ll know that's not what it means.

Incidentally HR workers refer to themselves as "professionals".

We don't call people 'disabled' any more, we call them 'people with disabilities'. It sounds trite, but it puts the focus back on defining them as people, rather than by their disability. A bit like the difference between 'a black programmer' and 'a programmer who is black'.

The 'retarded' thing fell out of favour because it was heavily used as a pejorative, which doesn't help people who actually are retarded. When I was in neurology over a decade ago, the term had changed to 'developmentally delayed', as in, hadn't hit the mental milestones that a kid of that age should have hit. I loathed that term, because while most parents knew (or were told) to interpret that as 'old-fashioned retarded', to some parents it sounds like the kid is just delayed, and given enough time, will catch up. Some kids do, and at better rates than in ye olde days, but plenty of them don't.

I find it interesting that you chose to analogize "disability" with "black"...

I recently watched a video on social media that was about raising awareness of people with disabilities and encouraging people to use their votes this election cycle to make a difference. It was very moving until the end where they had "#CripTheVote"[0], and I was like "WHAT?" Isn't "crip" short for "cripple"? And isn't "cripple" considered insulting these days? Is this some sort of "take back the word" movement?

[0]https://twitter.com/hashtag/cripthevote

It's a reclaim of the word.

I thought the idea behind "Human Resources" was that the people who work in HR are supposed to be a resource for humans, not the other way around.

They had to go with "HR" because "Geheimstaatspolizei" was too hard to spell.

Er, no, it's not it's because that group manages a particular set of resources for the company, to wit, the human ones.

Oh, it never occurred to me that I'm supposed to be offended by "personnel", nor by "HR".

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