Hacker News Reader

Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

Killer and master/slave are very different. "Killing" has rarely singled out one specific ground of people and subjugated them for centuries. In cases where it has, you don't use the word. Imagine naming a program that kills a bunch of processes on a box “holocaust”.

But let's run with "killing" for a bit. If, hypothetically, you had a coworker whose family was murdered by a serial killer, wouldn't you be careful about using “He killed it out there” and similar terms around them? Or do you sit around logically proving why the context is different?

View on HN

Those are fair points but I still don't think we are helping anyone with this over-protection. Would you hesitate to say that expression without knowing that coworker's background? Should he/she be offended when there isn't malicious intent behind those words? It looks to me more sensible and a better long term solution to help this person to deal with his/her emotions instead of trying to change everybody around them.

> Would you hesitate to say that expression without knowing that coworker's background?

Ok. But. The discussion is about specific expressions almost everybody knows, not just random words. One of those words is `slave`.

> It looks to me more sensible and a better long term solution to help this person to deal with his/her emotions instead of trying to change everybody around them.

I think this only applies to situations in which one specific person has specific triggers who are e.g. tight to an psychological trauma...

> "Killing" has rarely singled out one specific ground of people and subjugated them for centuries

While the term holocaust mainly refers to what the Jews went through during WWII, slavery encompassed not just blacks, but many other races including whites. The problem here is that the "discussion" happening is extremely US centric, that non-Americans are either looking at it as absurd, or they've become so Americanized that they think it's correct, meaning they also have no proper critical thinking skills and are easily swayed.

If it was actually a wholesale destruction by fire or something similarly final, I'd have no problem calling such a process a "Holocaust".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com