Sometimes avoiding those connotations are exceptionally hard, verging on impossible. In comparison, it seems a documentation change from whitelist to allowlist might just be a single find & replace away for a project.
Is it? Two years ago if someone told me they think of certain races every time they hear about whitelists or black holes I'd find them a bit silly.
That is 100% an anglo-saxon world problem since most European languages either differentiate between words for skin color and color name, or using the color name to describe skin color isn't considered racist at all.
I would stretch it even to mark it as an US-only problem.
TIL. Fascinating.
> covid (or some variant on that) to be feminine.
And here I was hoping that I was being too pessamistic.
It's mostly due to the pronunciation and spelling of the word ending. Although in this case, the Académie Française decided feminine because COVID is an acronym, and the last word of that acronym is disease, and disease is a feminine word (la Maladie) because of how it is spelled.
Every couple of years they release a statement that causes a flurry of changes in the documentation of a few projects I've worked on. Always in really curious ways too, exchanging words that are common to French people in our industry with words uncommon to everyone.
I kind of appreciate the quirkiness of the whole thing.