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Comment by peoplefromibiza | Hacker News Reader

Do you realize that the only one offended here is you and are using that to gaslight people into feeling bad for something they haven't done and it's mostly not even wrong?

for example: you should learn that main and master mean absolutely nothing to 95% of the people of the World. In my language "master" translates to maestro, which predates US slavery and symbolizes something completely positive: a master of some - usually artistically relevant - craft with followers that branched from the original (like the master branch in git). they are just labels to us,, if you are offended by that, there are a lot of other ways to cope than attack people who don't care about them and rightfully so.

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> symbolizes something completely positive: a master of some - usually artistically relevant - craft with followers that branched from the original (like the master branch in git).

Even in English, the term "master" branch has nothing to do with slavery. It originates from a master audio recording, usually just referred to as a master, from which other recordings are made.

It actually has the same origin as the parent poster of your comment:

Late Old English mægester "a man having control or authority over a place; a teacher or tutor of children," from Latin magister (n.) "chief, head, director, teacher" (source of Old French maistre, French maître, Spanish and Italian maestro, Portuguese mestre, Dutch meester, German Meister), contrastive adjective ("he who is greater") from magis (adv.) "more," from PIE mag-yos-, comparative of root meg- "great." The form was influenced in Middle English by Old French cognate maistre.

Source: https://www.etymonline.com/word/master

> In my language "master" translates to maestro, which predates US slavery and symbolizes something completely positive: a master of some - usually artistically relevant - craft with followers that branched from the original (like the master branch in git).

Exactly. Which is also (what at least I think) where "master copy", which has been claimed to be the origin of git's "master branch" comes from. Whether via the music industry's "master tape" as claimed elsewhere in this discussion, or more directly from the "master's manuscript" all the other monks duplicated in a mediaeval monastery's scriptorium, who knows... But zero to do with slavery, AFAICS.

"maestro" (in many languages) just as "master" come from Latin magister, see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/magister

This is not to say it’s fine to make ad hominem attacks to anyone on its vocabulary. But telling people they should silently accept to use words rooted in a notion of social dominance, doesn’t seem any better. There is a difference on pointing every occurrence of social practices that favor the spread of a domination system, and blaming personally the people who instantiate these practices.

> But telling people they should silently accept to use words rooted in a notion of social dominance, doesn’t seem any better

could be, but...

most words are rooted in a notion of social dominance and only carry a a notion of social dominance when used in the context of expressing social dominance (to oppress or abuse of other people).

words like reign or empire or dictator are absolutely rooted in a notion of social dominance, but we accept that it's completely fine if we use them as a metaphor or as an hyperbole. If someone gets offended, it's their fault.

Some example:

- 2013 was the year in which the reign of Federer at the top of the men's game had supposedly come to an end

- Amazon empire: the rise and reign of Jeff Bezos

- Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, has been called a benevolent dictator for life

>most words are rooted in a notion of social dominance

Most, I don’t know really, that would need a lot of statistics, but we can certainly agree that a significant portion of the vocabulary pertaining to social matter do.

>words like reign or empire or dictator are absolutely rooted in a notion of social dominance, but we accept that it's completely fine if we use them as a metaphor or as an hyperbole.

Yes, sure, when the context is appropriate, we totally agree. We might lake enough proper bandwidth with flat text alone to discuss that properly though. :D I’m confident it would be far easier to have a conversation on that topic topic around some drinks and laughs for example.

That said, in all example given here, the connection to the toxic social attitudes are obvious.

Every competition-focused sport is rooted in the parable of imposing one dominance on an other, carrying a supremacist perspective with it. That’s why for example yoga competitions will be controversial, while it tennis is not.

As for the two latter celebrities, they don’t really have a reputation of being paragons of empathy that we can point to and say "if everyone would act like this in its interpersonal relationships, humanity would live in gentle bliss and harmony." To be more precise, I don’t know them personally, this remark is really not about these individuals, but more on pointing that in these specific cases, the matching reputation doesn’t serve well the point of uses in metaphoric or hyperbolic ways.

> Most, I don’t know really, that would need a lot of statistics

Believe me.

You wanna know something funny?

The word used in Latin for betrayal (tradunt from which derives tradimento in Italian) at its origins meant "to give, transfer, deliver"

When the Christians came to be, they changed its meaning to something bad because Judas "gave Jesus away".

A simple innocent word has become the quintessence of being an awful person because of a stupid religious myth that also started one of the many persecutions of the Jews.

So beware of changing the meaning of words or advocating for their removal from the public discourse, you'll never know who's gonna be hurt by it.

> the connection to the toxic social attitudes are obvious

the only thing that is obvious is that they are only hyperboles, Amazon is not an Empire, Linus Torvalds is not a dictator and Federer did not actually reign over anything.

I would also argue that Linus has been seen as "benevolent" and I really wanna know from you where the connection to the toxic social attitudes lies when we talk about Federer's reign.

It's obvious to me that the sentence was referring to "the king of mens' tennis" (as a metaphor, do you know what they are?) to celebrate him and not to some literal evil ruler who should be dethroned, with the use of the force if necessary.

> But telling people they should silently accept to use words rooted in a notion of social dominance

The paradox I've observed people disagreeing with is you either believe in words having magic powers that, such that even if no one knew these connotations they would still have them, or you believe in keeping old connotations alive precisely so you can tell people to stop using them because of the old connotations.

Telling people what their vocabulary can imply is one thing. Telling to others which word they might consider instead is a separate step, that can certainly be fine, don’t we agree?

Unilaterally telling others what words they must use is a domination mechanism, whoever engage in such a practice, don’t we agree?

If we don’t listen to what our words inspire to others, how can we know if it matches our intended meaning? If we don’t continuously hone our habits, including our language habits but definitely not only that, how can we progress as human individuals, collectives and societies?

>believe in words having magic powers that, such that even if no one knew these connotations they would still have them

The trick is simple to explain, isn’t it? We can perfectly be healthy carrier, and yet people will die from this virus we contributed to spread.

Just because something is untroublesome in our own specific case doesn’t mean it won’t contribute in the diffusion of something awful at societal level. That is, the only scale level at which we can measure how much benign or hurtful this thing is for humanity.

> The trick is simple to explain, isn’t it? We can perfectly be healthy carrier, and yet people will die from this virus we contributed to spread.

Except words aren't pathogens. They aren't complex molecular nanomachines that actively avoid our bodies' defenses while incidentally doing damage to it. The only effect they have is in what connotations they trigger in people. In this case, even if the word has troublesome origin, if approximately no one knows about it, then the person bringing up that connotation is the pathogen causing harm to people by convincing them to get worked up over a word, where they wouldn't before.

Words aren’t pathogens, indeed, pathogens are not that great to produce analogies and parables.

We can’t know what words will actually have on people until we release them. But we know that words we use can make a significant and measurable difference:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-minute-therapist...

https://brm.institute/neuroscience-behind-words/

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...

>if approximately no one knows about it

How close to "approximately no one knows about" are we in an antonym association like master/slave?

>the person bringing up that connotation is the pathogen

Well, that is what we can call focusing on the person rather than the social mechanism at stake, isn’t it? Kind of an equivalent to the mechanism through which we produce reactions like "look this bird of ill omen that pretends that there is an invisible entity passing from one person to an other but whose malign effect only reveal randomly, clearly this person is the actual cause of the issue".

> How close to "approximately no one knows about" are we in an antonym association like master/slave?

For some in the US and those adopting this particular aspect of its culture. For everyone else... well, there's some hundred other antonyms that come to mind before:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/master

Apprentice, amateur, loser, subordinate, subject, secondary, incompetent, inexperienced, junior - to list just a few. The only form of "master / slave" association people have - except for in the USA - is with the nomenclature used for IDE/SATA drive configuration in BIOS.

And that's in English alone. Other languages generally have their "master" equivalent disjoint from slavery or adjacent topics.

Generally, these "conversations" have not been:

>Telling to others which word they might consider

Instead the pattern seems to be a group of people on Twitter/Mastadon/social media de jur all taking a quote and sharing talking about how awful it is that someone use the word "blah" in this day and age and how they are a horrible person and we should call up their work and get them fired...

Sometimes even completely misunderstanding what the person is talking about; as one of the first examples of this rousing to cancel people was a guy telling his friend that he would fork that code and someone misunderstood it to be sexual....followed by much ado about dongles.

Hey, thanks for the feedback, I’m glad I don’t spare any time in these platforms… :)

It wasn't on any platform - the guy got fired for saying something at a conference, and the woman who sent the photo and tweet of him also got fired as she was a "developer evangelist" and her employer didn't think that would fit.

Your comment seems so extreme and ridiculous to the point of Poe's law (can't tell if it's satirical or sincere). We would have to make every language very dull indeed if that was the kind of critera for acceptability of words... And how far back in the etymology would somebody have to go to determine whether it's sufficiently non-domineering??

I fail to see what is extreme in it, in all sincerity.

It’s not like it’s a call to act in any extreme way. Actually, the comment doesn’t even mention anything that one should do.

We can listen to other feelings and interpretations of our words even with zero etymological consideration at stake. But if we try to deny their feeling that some word is derogative and back our perspective on lexical neutrality, maybe we might double check we are not missing some well documented semantics of the word and its history.

That said, given the number of downvotes, it looks like I miss some contextual clues about what it might make it feels as some call to extremist POV.

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