Here’s an idea. American Big Tech should form a Uniban Consortium to streamline the process of adding and banning new harmful words of the month. Then your OS update could come with support for, say, Unicode 20.0 and Uniban 6.0: five new emojis and fifty new words banned!
Btw, the word main should probably be put on a future batch; too similar to “man” to be comfortable.
If they could they'd ban the letter X to prevent people typing "sex"
Also quite annoying how they simply tell us what to do, without justifying things. A lot of these would be quite hard to truly argue - i.e. "blind people... can't see things. why exactly is that metaphor inappropriate to talk about visibility?" So they just assume an authoritarian tone and just instruct us in how we should behave.
"grayed-out, greyed-out, gray out, grey out Don't use. Instead, use unavailable."
WTF are these people on about.
Oh it's because they hate certain color words such as "black" and "white", words used by humans to indicate certain reflectivity properties of light; since it would be weird to only prohibit words which contain white or black, they just extend the prohibition to nearby related words.
It’s the same with “the box is checked” to mean “selected” or “redlining a contract” to mean “negotiating.”
The point of inclusive language isn’t some weird political points contest. It’s writing in a manner that’s clear to people of lots of different backgrounds and doesn’t rely on just having to know English idioms or have common shared experiences. Why is blacklist the one that excludes and whitelist the one that includes — you just have to know, English right? But you can avoid the need for that entirely by allowlist and denylist.
There are also cases like "white-glove" where the phrase doesn't just represent the stereotypical "white = good & black = bad" - there is real meaning here, since white is a color which makes dust more visible.
The extension of your logic is that all writing should be geared to people with no knowledge, no historical reference, no firm understanding of the language, no visual or auditory cues (how do you talk about music without harming someone? Seriously, I ask this as a former music columnist). That is not language. [Edit: It's at best a graphic, except even that would be prohibited]. That is the conveyance of minimal information, like, 'don't stand here (in the place formerly known as being in front of a door).' It's completely absurd. It's inhuman. It's bent and wicked.
Words are a tool used to convey meaning mate. Cracking the shits because you've gotta make concessions means you're not seeing a hammer as a hammer
(And elsewhere it's being asserted with equal fury that master/slave replication and assumptions that people are exclusively male shouldn't be flagged because the choice of words doesn't have any deeper meaning...)
Honestly, can you not see how staggeringly self-centred it is to insist that if readers have to Google your idioms that's the beauty of language (even for documents where clarity is more important than linguistic flourishes) but removable squiggly line suggestions are far too much of an imposition on native speakers (who are of course both incapable of making a word choice in error and too vulnerable not to unthinkingly accept Google's suggested alternative in their private documents).
Honestly, the word privilege is overused, but I can't think of anything more apt to describe a cohort of people so far removed from any real threat that the most tyrannical thing they can think of is a clunky grammar check feature.
[1]Ironically, my phone actually insisted on overwriting my pryvate werrds with alternative spellings. Tyranny, I tell you.
You know what's self-centered? Telling the whole world that they're writing the right or wrong way. Believing everyone reads the way you do. Believing you know what words they should use and what their aims are in addressing a reader.
>> Honestly, the word privilege is overused, but I can't think of anything more apt to describe a cohort of people so far removed from any real threat that the most tyrannical thing they can think of is a clunky grammar check feature.
The grammar check feature is the thin end of a wedge. Who's more privileged than someone worried one of the world's largest companies is setting policies that restrict or nudge private language in billions of documents? I guess "more privileged" would be the people who have no understanding of the history of political suppression of language and think that using the word "landlord" is a form of "harm" or "violence" which entitles a company to involve itself in the content of people's letters (and here, any comparison to spell checking is totally disingenuous). Anyone who believes language is "violence" and supports policing it is either a totalitarian or so privileged themselves as to have never seen violence.
It's not a question of being able to turn the feature off: It's the sheer monomaniacal hubris of people who think they have a right to be the voice in someone's ear or on someone's text document, trying to dissuade them from using words you arbitrarily don't like in a bid to control their behavior. That is exactly the nature of tyranny and totalitarianism. Only people with such extreme privilege as to have grown up far away from those things can pretend it's simply promoting "inclusivity".
BTW bro, have you looked at that photo of yourself at Machu Pichu on your website? You're the poster child for privileged people misusing "privilege".
>> whingefests
This also betrays your kind. "Quit whining" is a favorite line of most bullies. You're the kind of bully who gets their hands on a leftist idea instead of a fascist/racist idea, but show precisely the same lack of thought. They do try to make these virtue signaling behaviors and speech patterns easier for frat boys these days - makes you guys easier to switch off whenever they feel like turning accusations of "privilege" against you.
And no, it absolutely isn't disingenuous to suggest that a feature which suggests some words might inadvertently assume the reader is male or has negative connotations isn't somehow qualitatively different to one that tells you your Flesch Kincaid score could be higher, advises you to avoid the passive voice or starting sentences with "but", and even spellchecks have a subjective component (as I'm reminded whenever I decline a tool's suggestion to substitute Noah Webster's spellings for the ones I was taught). All style guide stuff involves judgements by humans based on what they think is better for other humans to read and none involves any behaviour control (at least not unless the style guide checker is your boss).
You can't have it both ways, if word choices are incapable of alienating people it makes bugger all difference to have a software feature with some words suggesting using some different words. If the beaty of words matters deeply to you, maybe their etymology or gender implications matter to some people who are not you too. Personally I'd say people thinking that landlord is a pretty worrisome term are a bit over the top, but they're not half as over the top as people insisting there's something akin to the suppression of political speech about suggesting "proprietor" as an alternative and anyone who doesn't agree with them is a bully.
BTW bro, thanks for checking out my website. Not sure why you think that old pic gives you great insight into my background, but let's just say I haven't lead such a sheltered existence I feel bullied by a user configurable linting tool and people not agreeing with my opinion on linting tools.
A decade of social media has shown that small changes to UIs, news feeds, opt-out features and suggestion algorithms have radically changed human behavior. This is a dark pattern attempt to change human behavior. A neutral tool for typing documents has no business making this an opt-out feature. The aim of it is not to improve people's writing but to literally make people think twice about using certain words because someone, somewhere might be offended by them. The trouble is that when this becomes foremost in one's mind while writing, it absolutely warps the ability to speak honestly. It politicizes everything.
And these are not suggestions made by humans. They are being made by an opaque AI. If that AI decides that a word is politically incorrect, a nudge like this can effectively dampen the usage of that word in practice, without any sort of wider debate.
Consider how this will play out when China and Russia require Docs and other word processors to include "nudges" like this, for example about the Ukraine war, or Tibet. Of course, you can still type what you want to, but the chilling effect of seeing a warning pop up about a word you've just written is enough in many places to make you delete it. Just because it's being done first in the name of inclusivity or social justice and 'who could argue with that?' doesn't make it OK. It's a blatant attempt to control human behavior.
Consider how this already played out when the words in question were profanity. People cracked jokes about the clunkiness of a feature that censored the town of Scunthorpe but nobody old enough to get into cinemas came up with absurd comparisons to the Great Firewall of China or talked about it as mind control or bullying. No slippery slope was fallen down, and despite swear filters being pervasive in style guides and on user generated content tools, self-proclaimed free speech advocates ignored them to the extent they're actually insisting the social justice people did content filters first. I guess it's easier to be indifferent when you don't despise the cause behind it...
The "honesty" is inherent in calling a thing what it is. Red and green still exist, whether or not there are blind people who can't see them. Asking people to avoid the word "red", as in "redlining", is asking people to agree that 2+2=5. Some will do so out of fear. Some will do so because they're browbeaten with retarded arguments like the ones you're giving.
2+2=4. The people who thought the Great Firewall was a good idea for Chinese nationalism are just like you. They believed in doing the best thing for the most people, at the expense of anyone who disagreed with them. And like you, their real reason was not in fact to help anyone; it was showing that they had power to push their agenda.
>> I guess it's easier to be indifferent when you don't despise the cause behind it...
This is the real nut of it. If you find yourself indifferent to something because you're in favor if the cause behind it, but you would be outraged if you were against the cause behind it, then you had better speak out against it - because it will come for you eventually.
It always comes back and bites you. I'm a grandchild of holocaust survivors. No one spoke up for us. You are creating the conditions by which everyone is afraid to speak their mind.
I hope your own people do come for you first, and I'm confident they will find something in your Facebook or Twitter history to kick you out of society as language changes in the next few years and you find yourself left behind. My advice to you then is: Remember that you didn't speak up for anyone else you disagreed with.
This'll be the end of this; I'm done wasting my time on someone who can't understand the basic principles at work here. I hope the best for you and people like you when the fascists take over and tell you which words aren't inclusive of their idea of equity.
I don't think efficiency and universal comprehension is the point at all. Deaf people understand the phrase "loud and clear" just as well as hearing people. Blind people understand "redlining" as well as sighted people do.
Policing every bit of language to cater to every potential group robs the language of its color, which is something I suppose you couldn't say anymore. Robs it of its beauty. Robs it of its poetry. Destroys its capacity for nuance. In the name of what?
Can you possibly be serious? Is your idea of perfect communication something that omits every daily experience of every person who can see, hear, read, and walk? Should these concepts never be mentioned?
How is it "violence" to someone in a wheelchair to talk about walking to the store? They know they're in a wheelchair. They know other people can walk. You think preaching "avoiding the need" for idioms that refer to walking is somehow fixing inequality? It's daft and ludicrous virtue signaling, and worse, it's insulting to everyone you think you're protecting.
[Edit] The worst is, it's a power play. Google should not nudge or dictate the language you use in any document, let alone a private text document! Words are our tools, human tools, to use as we wish to express what we want, the way we want, and you and Google have no right to police them.
> Is your idea of perfect communication something that omits every daily experience…
No, what? It’s about avoiding terms where the context for understanding them are experiences not everyone has — “temba his arms wide” only makes sense to the Darmok.
> How is it "violence" to someone in a wheelchair to talk about walking to the store.
It’s not what are you even taking about? You should not presume that your reader can walk by saying things like “when you are out walking to the store” but there’s literally nothing wrong with mentioning walking.
> Policing every bit of language to cater to every potential group robs the language of its color
So this isn’t true, nobody is trying to force this on all language. But you have to take a step back and reflect on this. Given a hypothetical world where the choice was language color and including groups different from your own experience you really picked the former?
The real choice being presented is between a world where language has many colors as used by many groups when talking within and between groups, and one where everything is supposed to be "inclusive"... an idea based on the feelings or hypothetical feelings of some person, somewhere. You think we should all adjust our language and it's worth removing any color to accommodate that hypothetical person's feelings, and I think that's not only insane, it's an attempt to use phoney virtue to dictate to and feel power over others.
You may as well ask whether I'd choose a world where everyone spoke English rather than one which excluded people by some groups speaking their own language. There are, in fact, linguistic supremacists who think like this, and can frame it as an argument for "inclusivity"... e.g. the Chinese government. What it really amounts to is cultural imperialism.
In other words, by trying to be inclusive about allowlist aren't you taking away opportunity to include ESL folks in that rich history?
Anyone will have to ask/learn about able/denylist behavior anyways on their first encounter, and learning "whitelist" would have a multiplier effect that increases comprehension of the numerous similar usages they will inevitably encounter. That seems like active inclusivity to me, but I wouldn't be surprised if I'm missing something (I hadn't ever thought down this line until I read your comment).
Note: I'm specifically asking about otherwise neutral terms and have come around on avoiding any terms that are still used in the same way as their offensive history (e.g. no master/slave but yes master debater).
Did it even have a suggestion or is every word containing a color just blindly labeled dirty?
Giving these dummies what they want won't defuse anything. Thus far, doing so has not retarded the progress of this sort of language policing, but has led to increasingly insane demands. It's like handing your lunch money over to a bully in the hopes she will stop bullying you.
I think the way to stop outrage culture is to stop incentivising 'outrage' by refusing to indulge these lunatics.
We don't have to all be helpful, logical or anodyne all the time, either. Repressing what you want to say is unhealthy and also leads to dishonest debate. We don't need to be coddled and protected from some speech by algorithms. What we need to do is learn to see the rhetorical flaws and rebut them - as you just have (although, as I said, those flaws were there on purpose, as a layer of meta-meaning in sarcastic word choice that would fly over the head of an algorithm).
> every parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied
I could tell you were being sarcastic, but the fact remains your said what you said. Sarcasm is great for tearing bad things down, but useless for building anything to replace it.
I am not a fan of this Clippy shit either, but I can see value in things I don't like. The world needs more nuance, not less. And the world needs people to be willing to explain the nuance, not serve it as an inside joke for those who already get it.
I also don't want an anodyne and bland world, but I believe some communication should be that way. In fact, I believe the world would be a better place if the populist messaging were more lower common denominator, and our personal communications more dynamic. Not because it legally has to be, but because it helps preserve the status quo (which I selfishly like).
I think there are other reasons to care about the "lowest common denominator" (which really means, people who don't think like me) besides to manipulate or gain something from them. I believe everyone has value as human beings, and we'll build a better society if everyone understands the conversation.