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Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

Canon is excellent, but I fear it wouldn't catch on due to its religious origins / connotations.

I can appreciate that "canon" is used in religious contexts, but its meaning and origin go back further than that. Wiktionary (hardly the best source, I know) lists three secular meanings before the religious ones begin. The most relevant is this one:

> A group of literary works that are generally accepted as representing a field.

Also, the coinage "fanon" (as in derivative works by a fanbase) comes directly from the treatment of the source material as "canonical". (Frankly, "canonical" is the best argument I can make for "canon".)

> but its meaning and origin go back further than that

master/slave goes back to Mesopotamia, 4 thousands years ago and was used to describe the relationship between men and gods

> Man was believed to have been created to serve the gods, or perhaps wait on them: the god is lord or master (belu) and man is servant or slave (ardu)

I guess being that old is not good enough nowadays

But git doesn't use master/slave (noun). It uses master as an adjective ("master branch"). Think cassettes and vinyl records or "master boot record". It means being the definitive source of truth and has been used in that form for centuries [citation needed, but I don't remember where I read it].

This isn't just an instance of "not old enough", it's an instance of it not even being the same word, so I guess you just can't win this...

Yep

I made the same point here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23970140

what are the religious origins/connotations? That various religions also have a canon and apocrypha?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com