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Especially because PITM is already used in other contexts
People are free to choose to say PITM instead of MITM if they feel the original term is offensive, but it shouldn't be forced onto everyone (e.g. GitHub issues nagging maintainers to change MITM to PITM in order to be more "inclusive").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_(word)
Of course, the meaning of words change over time. But also, the meaning of words in a compound expression can be different from the meaning of the word on its own.
(See also how a pickpocket is not a type of pocked, nor is a cutthroat a kind of throat.)
It most certainly is not.
I could talk about linguistics but instead I'll just point out that the default attacker is a woman named Eve.
The purpose of these forced changes is an American understanding of DEI, pretending it's not about that feels like a lie, and being told a transparent lie feels insulting to me because it suggests the person telling the lie considers me dumb enough to not see through it.
Trespasser-in-the-Transit
Sometimes terms and icons loose their word by word meaning and their own independent one.
That's how idioms work.
But words shape the images we form in our minds. The issue with man-limited phrases is that we imagine men, specifically. That's also how words work and we know this through studies.
So we ought to fix this. But I'm sure OP already know why people seek to get rid of these unwanted gendering in idioms. That's not new anymore.
It's mildly annoying because we are used to the old term but that's very temporary, for the time of the transition. But I'm sure OP instantly understood the meaning of Person in the Middle the first time you saw it, so I have troubles understanding why someone would oppose such an evolution. Surely it's not about clarity.
We never fixed anything by refusing change and staying in the past.
It's bikeshedding, we have climate change, rise of extremism, wars around the world etc.
BTW do all people identify as person?
It's one of these phrasing assuming a world of men. I consider this to be problematic.
> we have climate change, rise of extremism, wars around the world etc.
Whataboutism?
> do all people identify as person?
Bad faith? And what do you mean? What are you trying to imply?
People is pretty much the plural of person.
Would you blame a woman not identifying as a man?
I’m from Holland and we have this weird thing called Sinterklaas where we dress up as black people and basically make fun of them.
However, don’t tell them this because they will tear you a new one. How dare you touch these sacred traditions.
I feel the same way about master/slave and gendered bullshit. It’s not the end of the world and let’s not make it bigger than it is, but sometimes you at least just have to admit things are fishy.
Because it's not "this one small change", it's friction added everywhere where you're trying to communicate, while also implicitly (and sometime explicitly) being called evil for using well-established language.
It's also not 1-2 terms, people come up with new, increasigly far-fetched reason to ban new terms every year.
I'm trying to submit a patch, but instead I have to deal with a linter telling me that "blacklist" is evil, so I'm now supposed to either refactor the existing software or tell some vendor to please change their URLs.
I'm trying to understand something, but I now first have to guess what a term is supposed to mean, because each keyword with a well-established meaning has now been replaced with half a dozen of new terms.
I'm trying to push a git repo to Github and things break because different parts got updated to the politically-correct "main" instead of "master" at different times.
It's a no-win situation, either you just silently take it and put up with it - but that makes the problem worse, because people come up with more bullshit, or you push back. Either way you're stuck dealing with this, as you call it yourself, bullshit.
I’m sure we’ll find a few others.
You’re telling me these few changes and new terminology are too confusing?
It’s not like we are rethinking all of language. It’s a couple of terms and minor tweaks in ways of thought.
The amount of pushback is IMO disproportional to the minor inconvenience caused by learning a thing or two.
Remember that a lot of jargon that I cannot even repeat here used to be common vernacular not so long ago. My parents (and even I) for example were brought up with timeless children’s songs such as “nikkers dansen de troelala” en “hanky panky shanghai”. I’ll leave those for Google.
It’s better to move on sometimes.
That's not what happens most of the time. The term is being criticized, not the person who used the term.
Also just using the term because it's common and actually opposing any fix are to widely different stances.
> far-fetched reason to ban new terms every year
Slavery and gender equality matters are far fetched? Or do you have examples of actually far fetched reasons?
Of course if you are telling people those things are far fetched, not everyone will see you with a good eye.
Nobody is out there trying to censor the language and ban words for not reason / for the lulz.
The push against making the Sinterklaas character of Zwarte Piet less of a racist stereotype is another culture war, provoked by shady organizations. Remember that there's foreign powers in whose interest it is to get people really upset over issues like this; they don't care who "wins", as long as people get upset over it and feel threatened by a boogieman.
I don’t know what to say. Meet some people outside your bubble. It certainly helped me.
Anyway, the Dutch and their deep-rooted racism are only superficially related to this issue.
My main point was to say that there exists the possibility that you may be wrong about holding on to outdated norms and changing things might be a good idea. Sinterklaas is just a particularly obvious one, but as you show, a lot of people still have some way to go.
ouch
I haven’t seen a floppy disk in weeks. And the noise it makes when I’m saving the drill protocol on which our monthly invoicing depends (+/- hundreds of thousands of euros) gives me cold sweats…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
So there is empirical evidence that it has a non-zero impact on the way people view the world.
What's wrong with Person-In-The-Middle? If we can include more people and make the topic more accessible and move a little stone off of the patriarchy mountain, seems like an easy win to me. Assuming you believe that systemic privileges exist and that they are bad and should be changed.