Hacker News Reader

Comment by bweitzman | Hacker News Reader

Those titles are gendered, unfortunately. If we want such a system, we should adopt new titles that are more inclusive.

AFAICS, the only one that's explicitly gendered is "journeyman". We've had a pretty good track record swapping out "person" in such situations when it's an issue. One might take issue with "master", and some senses of "master" are gendered, but some are not, such as senses 1c (particularly applicable here) and 1d:

> "c : a worker or artisan qualified to teach apprentices (see 1apprentice 1b)"

> "d (1) : an artist, performer, or player of consummate (see 1consummate 1) skill (2) : a great figure of the past (as in science or art) whose work serves as a model or ideal"

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/master

The word caries with it a history of a workforce dominated by men.

If there's going to be a new made up system for standardizing and measuring the proficiency of software developers, then we may as well make up new words too that don't have this baggage.

I agree that language is important for effective communication. I also am cognizant of how language changes over time, in meaning, connotation, usage, morphology. One can find problematic usage in a lot of places if one chooses to look. I don't believe that's what you're doing here, and don't mean to put forth some reductio ad absurdum argument. I'm interested to learn what heuristic you use to decide what language is acceptable and what needs to be changed. Would you mind sharing?

> If there's going to be a new made up system for standardizing and measuring the proficiency of software developers, then we may as well make up new words too that don't have this baggage.

This proposal is explicitly not making up a new system, but rather adopting an existing one.

Journeyperson? Next we’re gonna call mom and dad “parent and parent”

I mean, why not call my parent my parent instead of my mom or dad if my mom or dad don’t identify as cis? “This is my parent, Alex” is reasonable.

I'd rather have two dads, two moms, a mom and a dad...give people a name, a role, and not live in such emotionless and unlabelled society.

Do you have better suggestions?

Calm down. You are part of the problem. You piss off otherwise inclusive and reasonable people with such nonsense. JourneyMAN doesn’t mean an actual “man.” That is an archaic interpretation to suggest a journeyman means “man.”

We don’t call “fishermen” “fisherpersons” — that’s just silly. You can have female fisherman.

Please don't cross into personal swipes regardless of how wrong you think someone is.

Your comment after this one began with "You can fuck off if". The vector formed by these two points leads toward getting banned here. We've already had to ask you many times, and have cut you a ton of slack on this site.

Please use the site as intended—for intellectual curiosity; please don't be uncivil; and please don't use HN primarily for political or ideological battle. That's not too much to ask, and most users have no trouble getting there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Isn't "-man" an abbreviation of "human"? Justin Trudeau made a gaffe recently when an audience member referred to "mankind" and he erroneously insisted that she instead use the term "peoplekind". Surely "humankind" would be the term requested, if one felt the need to be pedantic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com