Hacker News Reader

Comment by Quarrelsome | Hacker News Reader

Is it still that offensive? The linked article discusses a peak of the term around reform of 19th century "lunatic asylums" where the phrase was in common use and had dark connotations but aren't all those people dead now? Is the term still somehow problematic and if it is, doesn't that imply that words like "insane" have the same problem?

View on HN

As far as I can tell, it's not offensive, and was never offensive. What can be offensive is using it as a term to refer to the mentally ill, especially in law - and it's really more antiquated than offensive even there. We have more specific and thoughtful terminology for varieties of mental illnesses now, that have nothing to do with the moon.

So if you have a law on the books governing how to treat lunatics, or how lunatics should be treated, it's a dumb old law because there's no official test for lunatic. It would be just as stupid if you had laws about the "wacky" or the "nuts."

The overwrought nature of the concern about seeing the word as the name of a piece of software is just a symptom of the current zeitgeist.

It's not offensive as much as it's kind of odd sounding, and would feel awkward pitching to someone else.

I mean, I had to think about it. Whether it's hugely offensive or not isn't necessarily the right question here. With the whole English language to pick from there are probably better choices that are less ambiguous.

I personally worry somewhat about social-censure. Here's [1] a talk that asks (among other things) if Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses would be published or even written today and I think that concern relates a little to our conversation. While its quite easy to see the argument for self/social censure (as usually someone is personally motivated to make it), I worry that the argument against it is much harder to see and has less organic advocates.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dhrlhm/the-reith-lec...

> Whether it's hugely offensive or not isn't necessarily the right question here.

It is the right question. If a term once considered offensive no longer is one, and there's no one who gets offended by it, is it still offensive?

> With the whole English language to pick from there are probably better choices that are less ambiguous.

Given infinite time and finite language, every term will become offensive. What then? Especially considering the euphemism treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Lifespan

Luckily most projects won't be around for infinite time

Reply on news.ycombinator.com