Words have different impact to different people. It doesn't cost us anything to use "isolated" node rather than an "orphan" node, but it made the dev feel less excluded.
If I'm a muslim who doesn't drink alcohol, and people I'm working with keep talking about having a beer and "what? you really don't drink". Does that mean everyone should stop drinking alcohol?.
Yes different words have different meanings, but once you start tinkering with this, where do you draw a line in the sand?
When I read the tiltle the first thing I thought about was "Man in the middle" attacks which belongs to the security field. How do you rename this? "woman in the middle"? doesn't this sound sexist? wouldn't some guys use this to have sexist jokes with their female colleagues and make matters worse?
I'm genuinly thinking out loud here.
Racism and discrimination is real, but we shouldn't conflate them with unfair powerstructures. We need to level the playing field and speak up against bullying.
Sufficed to say; as my mother used to tell me constantly: life is kind of unfair.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to make things fairer of course!
There are some things I generally agree with- I take an opposition position often because people should understand that changing the status quo should come with strong and valid reasons; there is a lot of institutional change that people ask for and it comes at some level of cost, so it's not something we should do with complete frivoloty.
Also, when it comes to certain terms (Allowlist/Denylist); these are sometimes simply better at conveying what things _do_ and terminology changes for those things can stand on those merits alone.
All that is to say: perceived offence, is a very poor reason to change.
Not because I'm arguing that people need to suck it up or even that there isn't some level of anguish, but because inherently it has no end. There is no line you can draw. I'm not even saying that "it's a slippery slope" I'm saying that the minute you draw a line you exclude people.
As an example of why you can't draw lines:
I grew up poor, I might get offended if someone referred to something as 'being in poor condition'; thus you may, on my behalf, want to remove that word.
Many people in the world do not have feet, and thus, the word 'football' might remind them of the trauma of losing their feet (or never having had feet).
I feel like it's worth mentioning here that 'bot' comes from 'robot' which has roots in the Czech language for "forced labour".
Not to mention master/slave are clear in terminology, one instructs, the other obeys, it is terminology that has existed for literally thousands of years (and yes, it is an atrocity when it happens to people). I would also caution strongly about suggesting that it has racial motivations as, of course, black people are not exclusively slaves- even today there are more slaves than at any point in history; and I can assure you, they're not all black.[0]
It would help immensely to quantify the impact of these kinds of changes, asking the affected community what they think/feel; that would kill a lot of the discontent around "virtue signalling white people" which is part of the current discussion.
I feel like it doesn't need to be said, but words are polyphasic, they have multiple meanings depending on context, altering terminology brings about the euphemism treadmill[1] -- generally speaking the hate in our hearts is the issue, not the words we speak; and restrictions on language do nothing to curb that hatred if it exists.
New words or phrases will be created to skirt the rules and then we're back at the same place, with less words in our vocabulary.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/25/modern-slavery-...