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Comment by jrmg | Hacker News Reader

Oh come on. The page itself recognizes that it’s only advice.

There were a few things on the list I didn’t know the history of (e.g. ‘grandfathered’) that I’ll try to avoid now. I can understand why someone who comes from a different history than I do could be frustrated by them - indeed, I probably will be (mildly) now I’ve learned of the connotations. It costs me almost nothing to avoid them.

There are also a few things I find questionable - but on the whole this list is basically just ‘try to be kind to others’. It’s disappointing to see it so badly received.

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A good long part of the list is dedicated to avoiding black/white words as if the negative connotations of the color black, and the positive connotations of the color white, have anything to do with their use in racial contexts. I find this deeply disturbing and absurd.

A blacklist, a black-hat hacker etc have nothing to do with racialized use of these terms. The color black is deeply associated with death in European cultures, and as such it has clear negative usages. Trying to make it seem like this somehow reflects negatively on black people is simply wrong, ahistorical, and encourages a kind of extreme thinking that really does seem like a slippery slope.

The logic used to even suggest these words are harmful to black people directly leads to the conclusion that dressing in black at a funeral or representing Death as a figure hooded in black should be avoided, as they perpetuate this association.

Language absolutely affects how we think, the brain makes links subconsciously and learns all the time from all inputs, so I don't think it's sensible to dismiss the idea of language making small differences to how we think.

The most likely cause of death for me on the next 20 years, as a white man in his 20s, is suicide. A major part of the reasoning for that is men typically struggle to reach out and talk about issues. A contributing factor I think is growing up around phrases like "man up" or "stop being a girl". Obviously anyone who says them isn't saying "bottle up serious issues until it becomes too much" but that repeated learning does stick and despite times changing and there being far less pressure now to be an alpha head of family type guy, the issues continue to affect us.

I don't see any reason that same repeated learning from a young age wouldn't also apply to black/white language if there's an overwhelming imbalance.

Muhammad Ali famously gave a speech on exactly this, though he also covered cultural references as well which is a broader scope: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-52988605

The link between the color black and negative feelings exists beyond language, and it has 0% to do with anyone's race. Furthermore, the negative association is with the deep black color of funeral clothes, not with the brown color of most black people's skin.

Even more, the color black itself has many different connotations, and not all are negative. It is for example a color of formal prestige (black belt, black ribbon). It is high-contrast (the situation is black and white). It is the color of things which don't emit light (black body radiation, black hole). It is also the color of many bronze statues, and also of ebony - both often used to depict saints and Jesus himself all in black since medieval times.

Humans are perfectly capable of keeping context in mind, and connotations from one context don't actually bleed into other contexts all that much.

The missing representation of black people in European and American art is a different problem, and it is a real problem that won't be addressed by replacing black box with opaque box.

Not bleeding across "all that much" might well be true, though I disagree since it's kinda the whole strength of the human brain applying learning from one area to another, that's why we're more intelligent than animals and have been more adaptable to new problems. You're also thinking about this in terms of conscious decision making when in our day to day lives we rarely sit down with an open mind and properly think about things.

But even if it is not all that much, it's still there. A million people having a 1% shift in their views due to language adds up. That's why we're seeing groups of individuals who aren't racist/sexist somehow reach answers that statistically do appear to be.

The specifics of which uses are neutral or not is the next debate. Step 1 is acknowledging that language is something that feeds into the "nurture" side of how we think, especially since language is such a large part of our learning during early brain development. With that in mind, it's something that should be debated and selection of words should be considered.

If there actually was even a 1% universal association of the color black with evil (instead of the more specific associations that happen in certain contexts), do you really think anyone in medieval times would have created representations of Jesus, Mary and other highly revered figures in black wood or metal?

It is up to anyone claiming such an effect exists to go and prove it with solid data, enough data to overturn hundreds of years of language use. And if such a link actually exists, and someone actually believes in it, then I would like to see them insist people don't wear black (or red, yellow, brown or whatever other color they think is racialized) to funerals.

Edit: I also want to comment on the idea that the brain's ability to generalize would apply to meaning bleeding between separate contexts that use the same words. I think this is a misunderstanding of how the brain works. Concepts used in our thought later get translated into (spoken/written) language, or back again when listening/reading. But, the concepts are not the words that they are represented by. The black of a funeral is not the same concept as the black used to refer to a black person, even though they use the same word or symbol. Just like I'm not applying anything I know about mice scurrying through my house to the mouse I'm holding in my hand while playing (even though the origin of the word is exactly that animal), there is no reason to think there is any transfer whatsoever between the various meanings of black, even if they are related.

If you're waiting for someone to find a case of someone joining the KKK because they once heard about a blacklist, of course that is never going to happen. This is about one facet of learning that happens over 20 years of someones childhood, and then trying to link it to statistical issues that emerge over large groups. If it were even possible to isolate all the different factors to just look at language, it would take generations to test.

This is where we're coming at it from different sides. I think changing language is a relatively cheap and easy thing to do, that might help fix an issue in some small way, and there's really not much reason not to. The cause and effect is plausible, if not provable on any reasonable timescale.

Metaphor, simile, pathetic fallacy are all powerful tools that really do change the way we interpret the substance of what we read. Colours too, it's not a coincidence the major tech brands have gone with various blues, those blues are deliberately designed to nudge people towards a particular emotional response that is completely unrelated to the brand itself. If word selection really did nothing to change the impression of what we read, then writers and poets would be out of a job.

In NASCAR the color black is legendary for reasons I truly hope don't need to be explained

>The link between the color black and negative feelings exists beyond language

We should probably just stop calling people "black" then.

> Language absolutely affects how we think, the brain makes links subconsciously and learns all the time from all inputs, so I don't think it's sensible to dismiss the idea of language making small differences to how we think.

This is true enough, the problem is going from the conclusion that these negative associations will have any real-world impact. Recent reviews of implicit association tests (IAT) suggest that they correlate with nothing but brain activity.

This is the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it has been disproved many times. Language certainly affects how you think in the way you turn sentences (a french speaker speaking in english will definitely word and think of things relative to how french behaves), but the theory that using words that could eventually have had a racial history in the very specific context of the United States would affect you on a deep level is utter bullshit.

The issue with "man up" or "stop being a girl" isn't language, it's patriarchal habits having ingrained in many of us that men don't cry, men don't talk, men are strong. It's not the words used that kill you, it's the social construct.

> It's not the words used that kill you, it's the social construct

How does the social construct get perpetuated except through words?

By every single sense and aspect of you.

Hearing those words is a thing, yes. Men wearing floral perfumes will be shamed for it (patriarchy sees this as feminine). Men will receive less gentle physical touches, caresses, care, either in an expectation that it makes them weaker, or that they don't need it. Men are expected to dress a certain way.

Men don't commit suicide _just_ because they're told to man up and deal with it. They do it because of a socially enforced dreadful lack of emotional comfort. A hug doesn't need words to comfort someone, not being judged or looked at wrongly for going away from the mold doesn't need words to comfort someone. That's why it's a social construct, not a verbal construct. It permeates everything around you.

No. It’s not that simple. Yes there is a legacy of cultural practices to contend with, but it isn’t this all encompassing reality you imagine.

Consider that levels of affection afforded to men (or harshness they are expected to endure) vary significantly across cultures and very much between subcultures in a modern nation like the US. It’s trivial to find groups of people who are very positive about affection vs people who are very traditional within a few miles of each other.

These groups speak very differently about their ideas of masculinity (since you introduced that example) and will make different arguments about what is right. Those arguments absolutely do inform group members and newcomers alike about what is considered acceptable.

Language is of course not everything - people do learn through mimicry, but you might be surprised how easy it is to use language to get someone to try something they didn’t think was for them. Advertisers do this all the time.

I don’t really see how someone can sit there with a straight face and say language doesn’t matter because of patriarchy.

Also patriarchy doesn’t ‘see’ anything because patriarchy isn’t a person and doesn’t have eyes. Patriarchy is an academic term for a set of ideas, not a mystical being.

The point is that they get perpetuated through any words. "Ban" a word and a phrase will take its place.

This is very visible in the words used for those with mental disabilities. They used to be called "idiots" by doctors. Then, as idiot became a common insult, doctors moved on to "<people with a> mental retard". When that became a common insult, they moved on to "mentally challenged" and so on. This will be a never-ending arms-race though: as long as people insist on insulting others by comparing them to those that have a mental disability, they will always pick up the current medical terminology for them and use it as an insult.

Note that I'm not saying we should be calling children with Down syndrome "idiots" or "retards". Even though the "fight" will probably be endless, it's worth it not to use known derogatory terms for your pacients. Similarly, even though racists and other bigots can express their bigotry even with perfectly neutral language, it doesn't mean we should accept the use of slurs.

But it's also important not to get a false impression that just because Richard Spencer isn't using the n-word to refer to black people (in public), it means he's not being racist. You can always use language to teach others to hate BIPOC and ask for them to be thrown out of the country, along with LGBTQIA+ people if you're at it.

If anything, it's possible that the powerful connotations of "white" and "black" influenced their application in a racial context in the first place.

I see this backwards sort of thinking elsewhere in the list. Someone once used "yellow" as a racial pejorative, but instead of simply condemning the slur they attempt to preserve it, by forbidding other, non-racialized uses of the word "yellow".

I was surprised to learn about "grandfathered" here, too. But, frankly, I am skeptical of their explanation, after reading their incredibly specious reasoning for avoiding "tarball". Not to mention my skepticism over whether any serious numbers of black people would actually be offended by "grandfathered". But hey, I'm a white guy, so I could easily be wrong about that. (It's just that I feel like the majority of people who might jump down my throat for believing "grandfathered" isn't a big deal are more often than not likely to also be white people who don't actually know if the word is truly offensive, either.)

> but on the whole this list is basically just ‘try to be kind to others’. It’s disappointing to see it so badly received.

I think it's being so poorly received specifically because it doesn't come off as a "try to be kind to others" list. I do agree with quite a few of the things on their list, but many of the items are so out there and tenuous that it makes it seem like a list put together by some severely out-of-touch people who get off controlling others. Which, unfortunately, I suspect is actually the case. And I think overall it undermines the efforts of people who are trying to get others to stop using some of the legitimately harmful words on the list.

That might be the intent, but in a lot of ways it expresses the opposite. For at least half of the terms flagged by this page, one would have to construe the meaning uncharitably for it to be a problem. If I call someone a paraplegic, I only imply that the person cannot walk, not that the person cannot accomplish other great things. If you try to tell me that I meant that that person isn't a person at all, then you are the one being unkind, not me. It is not the case that "masters enslaved people" - some masters did, but some masters also served as teachers to an apprentice, and if you tell me that I meant the kind that enslaved people when I clearly meant the kind that taught apprentices, then you are the unkind one, not me.

But it's only ever people who come from the same history as I do (white upper-middle class) that are offended by them.

I really don’t think that’s true of the entire list.

There are exceptions, such as the handful of obvious slurs that they added (tar baby, hermaphrodite, etc) but the vast majority of the list is exactly like this.

Probably even things like policeman, man-in-the-middle etc are not offensive or patriarchal to the vast majority of women (especially since many such words are probably older than the current use of "man" to mean male person, and refer to the older sense of person, as in the US constitution).

> especially since many such words are probably older than the current use of "man" to mean male person, and refer to the older sense of person, as in the US constitution

I feel like that use is... complicated. Why, exactly, did "man" mean "person"? Why not "woman", then? It feels like using "man" to mean "person" -- including and especially in historic usage -- is itself patriarchal. Given the time period you reference -- the writing of the US Constitution -- I think it's even more stark, as it was written by men who were not inclined to allow women any sort of participation in the government (and I expect many of them did not feel that women were as entitled to many of the rights they were enumerating).

But really, the semantics aren't the primary issue. If a lot of women feel excluded by "man"-terms, then that's a problem. To be fair, though, I have never asked a female police officer or firefighter if she felt that "policeman" or "fireman" made her feel excluded, so I don't really know.

I think "excluded" is a better term than "offended" in some cases. "Offended" is a very squishy, subjective, imprecise, emotional term. What matters is why someone might feel offended by a particular term, and I could certainly sympathize with a woman who felt like "policeman" was implicitly telling her that she wasn't fit for the job, that women should be excluded from consideration for that job, or that women should intentionally exclude themselves from considering wanting that job.

As much as I disagree with a lot of the things on Stanford's list, I think calling words "harmful" is better and more descriptive than calling them "offensive".

It's amusing to try turning it round, makes you realise just quite how sexist it actually is:

"No, of course I'm not offended by being called a firewoman, why would I be? It's clearly referring to both women and men" - Jake Miller, Firewoman, Springfield Fire Department

The words woman/women refer explicitly to a group where every single member is a woman (female).

The words man/men, at least historically, can refer either to a group of unknown composition OR to a group where every member is a man (male). Basically it is a homonym with two separate meanings, just like mouse (animal or input device) or chair (object or leader of a committee).

Point being, policeman being ambiguous doesn't mean that we would expect policewoman to be considered ambiguous as well, since woman is not a homonym.

You would probably feel differently if you had learned the term man and mankind also refer to all human beings and that usage had been normal and active for your entire life.

Of course saying womankind sounds funny now because we haven’t heard it used for our whole lives. The term mankind derives from Sanskrit meaning children of Manu (a god). It’s not a sexist term and we’ve gone 2000 years without people finding it offensive, it’s only one that people with no other issues in their life need something to be offended about and decide to make a war on words.

Etymologically, in Old English, man used to mean person, and there were explicit terms for a (male) man and a woman - wer and wif. Wer fell out of use[0], and the generic "man" started referring both to all people, and to men (males) in particular.

This conflation found in early modern English uses of "man" started being seen as problematic in the early 20th century, and style guides started preferring other words to refer to people in general, thus relegating "man" to mean only male person somewhat artificially.

[0] the only remaining usage is in werewolf - though few would assume a werewolf has to be male.

[1] note that I am using "male person" only to make it clearer when I'm using the generic or specific meaning of "man". I'm not trying to conflate sex with gender or any other kind of subtle transphobia.

I think this could be rewritten as “only white upper-middle class people complain about these things” which doesn’t mean they’re the only ones offended or upset

They're not even offended by this language.

They just want to appear progressive and sympathetic. It's virtue signalling.

Allowing these people to police language is mass insanity.

Genuine question, because I hear this sentiment a lot.

Are they the only ones who tell you, a fellow white man, or are they the only ones who are offended? I strongly suspect (this is not meant to be insulting) that you may not have a relationship with the people who this language impacts. It takes an emotional toll to confide with someone that something is upsetting to hear, even with coworkers or casual friends, especially if you don't think they'd understand.

Also, language has the opportunity to shape and influence how we structure society, even unintentionally. Thats why there's a lot of emphasis on teaching children about what words are appropriate. Even if naming your git branch "master" won't realistically impact racism and the history of slavery, describing some bad event in your day a word that has an origin in describing people can lead to negative associations.

Tons of black people where I come from, and I've talked to a lot. The idea that somehow that black people are afraid to tell white people what pisses them off is racist and incorrect. Again, comes only from upper class white people who don't actually talk to anyone other than other upper class white people. Here's a tip for you. Don't spout woke shit to minorities you meet IRL (as in outside of SV). It's cringe AF, and will make people dislike you. Just talk to them like normal people, which they are.

I mean, you do realize that 99% of black people have no idea where "grandfathered in" comes from, right? You do realize that going into etymology to find offense is something only snobby linguistics cunts that you would find at elite universities would do, right?

> I strongly suspect that you may not have a relationship with the people who this language impacts.

In society we have come to a collective understanding that “I’m not racist; some of my best friends are black” is an invalid dismissal of a person’s potential for racism.

Somehow, however, we have also decided that if someone does not have a sufficient quantity nor quality of relationships with black people, then that is a strong signal of racism.

Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.

Brazil has started to try importing this US "harmful words" shenanigans, and most of the words they target are common vernacular among the supposedly harmed people

Labeling a word as harmful actually harms more, since most new generations are so removed from the word's origin that it carries none of the supposed harm

You should probably stop using language whatsoever, it was made by people who lived human lives.

Switch to something like Lojban.

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