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Comment by cisanti | Hacker News Reader

It might not be an excuse, but judging by the things people are offended by in America, it really is a cultural difference.

I dare you to find European devs who believe terms slave and master in tech context are offensive and should be replaced.

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I've never seen that care to share an example - but non native speakers can often make accidently offensive mistakes using the informal Du verses Sie.

I also saw a Swedish guy suggest (on a Stack Overflow Site) that some one with the first name Mohammed change this to his "White" name of Martin - they seemed totally oblivious of what they just sugested

> I dare you to find European devs who believe terms slave and master in tech context are offensive and should be replaced.

Oh, hello, I'm a European dev and I'm making a concerted effort to remove those terms both from my vocabulary and any code / tickets / documentation I come across.

And why would you do anything like that? To pamper to American counterparts? if you really are a Euro, you're brainwashed by American identity politics. Too bad they leak over the ocean.

> To pamper to American counterparts?

I think you'll find that the Americans don't have the only legacy of slavery to be worried about - they just kept it going longer than most. As a British person, I've got more than enough historical shame about slavery to make me want to avoid those terms.

There's no reason to be ashamed of, it's history. You didn't take part of it. By that standards, the whole world should be morning out of shame. There is no country that becomes one without violence, that is how the countries were born. Hence every citizen of each country should be ashamed of x.

> I dare you to find European devs who believe terms slave and master in tech context are offensive and should be replaced.

What's with the Europeans or Americans believing all sorts of generalized falsehoods about their counterparts ?

Of course there are European developers who hold such beliefs.

I'm sure there are, but the majority of Europeans would believe this is absurd and nonsense. You understood very well what I meant.

As would the majority of US devs. I just don't think there is a big difference.

Why are you so attached to the words "master" and "slave" anyway? Just because that's the way it was done in the past? Is inertia more important than connotation?

"Primary" and "replica" seem just as good to me.

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