Comment by WaffleIronMaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WaffleIronMaker | Hacker News Reader

WaffleIronMaker

This raises some valid points, like the validity of the singular they.

However, I think it is a bit to aggressive in listing unacceptable terms. I understand "off the reservation" because that still has a direct connection to racist origin. There is a defensible argument that it is referring directly to many atrocities that the United States government committed when moving Native Americans to reservations. Fine.

However, whitelist? That's just based off of a color. There's nothing directly racist about it. I'm sure some people feel uncomfortable when the word is used, but there's no logical reason why it should be a problem.

Just because one person is uncomfortable about a phrase doesn't mean the phrase is bad. I once had to leave the room when watching a movie because it had a scene that reminded me very strongly of an traumatic experience I had. However, there is no objective problem with the movie. I am not the main character of the universe, and it is not anyone else's fault that other things remind me of the trauma I experienced.

I don't believe people should be put in environments that are actively triggering, but "native feature"? There is no logical reason to be triggered by that.

This type of rhetoric is problematic because it vilifies people unnecessarily. Killing a process is fine, because processes aren't people. I'm not being violent. If you see the word "kill" and get distracted, that's a problem with your reading comprehension.

All in all, I agree that documentation should not be triggering or have terrible connotations. However, many of the words here are not triggering, and they do not have terrible connotations.

We kill processes, destroy variables, put objects in blacklist, push to a master branch, are we monster ?

Meanwhile in my language, every word has a gender, from table to banana, should I then be triggered by gender neutrality, a concept that "destroy my gender-heavy culture"? :D

Singular they is fine when you dont know the gender, it's true it's weird to favor masculine, or what I see in English favoring feminine. But putting your fav gender in email signature is a bit like... is it truly such a massive problem that everyone must comply and not just people for whom it's not clear ? Im not saying it s not a problem, just is it that massive ?

An interesting feature of some Asian languages (e.g. Japanese, Thai, Indonesian) is that in general they use 1 word (I'll write it as "s/he") to refer to third persons. I wonder how that's influenced kids growing up with the language.

Meanwhile in German they're trying to define RegExp, which is also pronouncable, for gender-inclusive words[1], since they differentiate between e.g. Pilot (male) and Pilotin (female) as well as Piloten (many pilots, in the old days this used to mean of mixed genders, but some people felt excluded) and Pilotinnen (many female pilots).

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/30/1049603171/germany-gender-neu...

Gabriele Diewald, a linguistics professor at the University of Hanover, disagrees. "The generic masculine is not a grammatical must," she says. "Claims to the contrary are deliberate attempts to continue marginalizing women and other genders."

Tja.

>> Gabriele Diewald, a linguistics professor at the University of Hanover, disagrees. "The generic masculine is not a grammatical must," she says. "Claims to the contrary are deliberate attempts to continue marginalizing women and other genders."

I mean that's technically true, since it's not even a must to have a number system or much in the way of color categories (or really anything except nounish things and verbish things), but it kind of misses the point.

Pretty bitter. It's a matter of convention. To color it a 'deliberate attempt' is a deliberate attempt to politicize normal linguistic conventions.

> An interesting feature of some Asian languages (e.g. Japanese, Thai, Indonesian) is that in general they use 1 word (I'll write it as "s/he") to refer to third persons.

IIRC, that's only true of spoken Chinese, they have different written pronouns for each gender.

> I wonder how that's influenced kids growing up with the language.

In my experience, it only results more mistakes using gendered pronouns (e.g. occasionally swapping he/she), but that's about it. It doesn't result in any kind less gendered outlook or greater acceptance of gender nonconformity or anything like that.

chairperson or chair over chairman I understand. engineer hours over man hours, sure, makes sense if everybody is contributing.

sister campus or grandfathered seems different, its not gendering a person, but an inanimate object or an action. in the case of the latter, the gender has nothing to do with the person performing the grandfathering. maybe its because the words have an endearing quality to them that substituting them feels like a loss. not sure how i feel about native meaning innate being stricken from available usage. a bridge too far maybe. does the concept of gender really need to be 100% eliminated from all speech?

maybe this comment will age poorly when someday i realize the error of my thoughtprocess.

Interestingly enough, one I think we should get better about IS present in the guide, albeit as part of their description and NOT something you shouldnt say. "When referencing users with disabilities..." The word users sounds like drug users, addicts etc. When talking about people, I have tried very hard to drop the word user from my vocabulary, purely out of respect and politeness. They/we are people. (In IT circles, user almost always has an additional very very slight to heavy pejorative tone to begin with. It implies lesser in some way, or an us/them tribalism, even if people saying it dont understand they are doing it.) The same should go for drug users. They are people.

I don't disagree with the thrust of your argument but the term grandfather clause originates from Jim Crow laws.

There we go, I stand corrected. I probably shouldn’t use it anymore.

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