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Comment by ushakov | Hacker News Reader

why does a company have a say which words are allowed to be used?

i mean there are some bad words you shouldn’t use, but i just can’t grasp why is there something like “motherboard” on that list?

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The banned words list they are referring to is about what words should be used in external product documentation and marketing :) Not about what you are allowed to say inside google, or anything like that.

the point still stands though

could you please explain to me, a non-native english speaker, why using "mainboard" is better than "motherboard"?

Some languages have gendered words as a fundamental grammatical aspect of the language (though since this language aspect evolved out of earlier grammatical distinctions that had nothing to do with “gender”, frequently the gendering of words is kinda random). English doesn’t have grammatical gender, and it has a relatively small set of words in its vocabulary that are specifically gendered. The argument goes that the use of some of this vocabulary is harmful, and that it’s easier to try to move away from using the whole class of gender-specific vocabulary words outside of actually gender-specific scenarios than it is to try to define and keep track of which gendered vocabulary words should be discouraged. Words like “motherboard” are collateral damage of this broader effort to discourage use of terms like “mothering”, which can be used in English to mean both “being mother to”, but also in a metaphorical generic sense as “being responsible for and looking after”, even of things that are not children, and is discouraged in favor of “parenting” or “caretaking”, which have the same implications but without the gendered aspect.

Parenting and caretaking don't have the same connotation as mothering.

It seems like people who object to motherboard don't understand analogy?

If the objection were to parenthood, which is to say if nurtureboard or parentboard were similarly offensive, then I agree this would have been a stupid stupid choice.

The problem is that you had a motherboard and daughter boards, those were the accepted terms, and never fatherboard or son boards, never parentboard or child boards. Why were they gendered female in the first place?

Because they had “female connections,” which is to say their use is in plugging pins into their sockets.

Obviously that is a sexual analogy that did not age particularly well, this idea that a motherboard is the motherboard because you shove stuff into it. So people started replacing with mainboard because it makes more sense...

>Why were they gendered female in the first place?

well, for this context, it's called a "motherboard" because "mainboard" was already a thing. Motherboard was to distinguish at the time how this new board can be expanded upon by plugging in ports. There was no real malice here, it was just fancy marketing term that stuck.

Ultimately, we're humans and we try to anthropize all kinds of things in life to make them "feel relatable", be it animals, boats, hurricanes, or yes, computer. so that extends to our language as well. Especially in marketing where the goal is to make customers feel good and close the sale. There may be a conversation on WHY we do this, but starting that conversation on the foot of "well people just want to be sexist" won't get us anywhere.

It's more likely that it's a similar naming to mother lode, i.e. the motherboard is the central source of the computer and everything connected to it is a child that hangs off of it.

so it's a belief system then?

It is the same logic as why we switched from "fireman" to "firefighter" or "stewardess" to "fight attendant" decades ago. Because some people find the old word offensive. The only real debate is the size of the "some" and whether that "some" is small enough to ethically ignore.

The thing is, those substitutions are logical because "fireman" doesn't refer to female firefighters. But "motherboard" is different, because "board" doesn't refer to a person.

Exactly. Mainship instead of mothership? I guess male and female plugs/sockets are off limits now too.

I'm tired of this sort of shallow, performative, language policing. I'm (I believe) a socially progressive, inclusive person, but this shit makes me tired. Just fucking leave it alone and spend our collective fucks to give on something that actually matters.

I look forward to the future of convex and concave connectors!

Perhaps, but this is your opinion. Maybe you are in the "some" for certain words and not others. I am not in the "some" for "motherboard" so I can't tell you exactly why people are offended, but I know they are. Whether the rest of us think someone taking offense is logical doesn't stop them from being offended.

I very much doubt anyone is actually offended by the word "motherboard". More likely it's a dumb inductive argument. "Some people are offended by some gendered words => every gendered word might offend someone => every gendered word must be eliminated as a precaution".

The exact same pattern was leveraged against blacklist - a word that has absolutely no connection with the skin color usage. It has been removed by notable projects and people were up in arms talking about it being necessary due to "people being offended".

Motherboard. It took me a few moments to guess as to why this is a "problem". Obviously due to the word mother. Let me roll my eyes.

Frankly it is completely absurd to be offended about a word that is part of a process that keeps our very species existing. Sadly I would not be surprised at all if there are google employees who are offended on behalf of "people being offended".

This is basically a semantic debate, but I guess this all is anyway. I don't disagree with the pattern you are describing, but I would describe it a slightly different way. There are people getting offended on the behalf of other people who potentially might get offended. Even if this second group never materializes or doesn't even exist, that first group is still getting offended on their behalf.

Basically I don't believe that "precaution" you mention is an apathetic but cautious person. These changes are more often motivated by someone who thinks "this might offend someone so I will take offense to it too".

There will be a group offended by anything.

People are wild. You can find small groups of people who do and think insane things. We as a society should not try to cater to every possible sensibility. That's a recipe for disaster.

It's not about the size of "some." It's about their objection being stupid.

Sterwardess doesn't make sense because Stewards are a thing as well. I guess this is just the Actor/Actress debate in this case?

You used another incorrect word!!! /s

> "Avoid referring to people in divisive ways. For example, instead of referring to people as native speakers or non-native speakers of English, consider whether your document needs to discuss this at all"

https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation#...

mainboard does not even communicate the same concept. A main board might be one of several disconnected boards where it performs the primary function, not necessarily the singular substrate on which all other components are hosted.

Because 0.1% of people feel like they are more comfortable adopting the social customs of the opposite sex, and... the culture wars.

I guess because it's kind of exclusive of fathers and/or stereotypical of mothers as the "family orientated parent".

Find me a reasonable person offended by this terminology and I'll show you an unreasonable person. That connotation doesn't come through at all.

Imagine a future where babies can be incubated in an external enclosure, rather than a womb.

This doesn't seem too unlikely. I've been hoping tech would go this way -- We're doing IVF in June, and it's still hit-or-miss whether it'll work.

In that future, if someone identifies as nonbinary but still wishes to have a child, neither "mother" nor "father" would accurately describe them. And since a womb isn't required for a baby, there's not necessarily any "mother" (nor "father") in that scenario.

That said, I think the argument is "mainboard is better than motherboard for the same reason that denylist is better than blacklist -- the whole point is so that people don't have to be reminded of social issues whenever the word comes up in discussion."

As an african american, I never particularly liked the whole black and white argument (literally in this case) because those words and concepts go beyond western culture and even civilization. "black" in this case isn't referring to me anymore than a black mage is referring to me in DnD (I don't play magical classes). It's from a much more fundamental concept that humans are diurnal creatures that can't see well at night. Or rather, the "black of night". the unknown is scary, night is full of the unknown. This is why every culture has some concept of "black is scary", because we all have this natural fear or discomfort of what we can't see (our strongest sense).

If nothing else, maybe we should revisit the language as a whole and its obsession with overloaded homonyms.

/rant

Perversely though, when I see someone say "denylist", it stands out as an odd word, and it makes me more reminded of social issues than if they had just said blacklist.

Reminds us all that instead of fixing real social issues we can all go into denial by changing the words that denote them

Maybe that's why its done?

"Don't mention the war!"

> there's not necessarily any "mother" (nor "father") in that scenario.

Is there not still an egg supplier and a sperm supplier?

Careful, you're suggesting there might be a meaningful biological difference between the sexes.

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