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Comment by patates | Hacker News Reader

I think they mean the kill/pkill. Not defending the silly chain of what-about arguments though.

Is it silly though? With enough linguistic archeology I bet you can make this entire comment I'm writing right now extremely problematic and offensive. The linguistic treadmill means exactly that older terms change meaning back in time. They also change meaning FORWARD in time, meaning your inoffensive terms today will almost certainly be offensive in the future.

It's also the case that offense is language dependent, which is always funny when Americans hard ban certain words on chats and then Swedes can't use the Swedish word for "end" because it's spelled like a slur in English.

Everyone needs to stop this nonsense.

> Swedes can't use the Swedish word for "end" because it's spelled like a slur

"Ände" is a slur? (excuse my lack of transductional skills)

They probably mean "slut". The word has the same meaning in Danish, by the way

The whole terminology in IT could be turned upside down because it can be quite offensive if people ignore the context, so it is not limited to processes. There are utilities like "man", "finger", etc. that could come across as offensive too, to some, with no context-awareness.

Today it is "master" -> "main", tomorrow the whole IT terminology.

There are many PRs on GitHub with regarding to these, by the way.

... also what about pins? Slave and master pins! Must be about slavery, right? No, it is not, not at all.

In any case, who made the association of the git branch "master" to slavery? It is absurd. People need to take the context into account.

IMO for something to be offensive it has to have intention to be offensive. Otherwise it's misunderstanding.

Of course, but they do not care about that. They made the association, and now they are being vocal about it. I am pretty sure most of us never made this association or attribution. I have never thought about slavery until they told me their own associations to it.

I am pretty sure master / slave pins were not intended to be offensive, nor attributed to slavery. Similarly with the git "master" branch.

And quite frankly, the problem is that we cater to such people instead of teaching them to be context-aware.

> In any case, who made the association of the git branch "master" to slavery? It is absurd.

BitKeeper, the VCS that preceded Git, used the terminology "master" and "slaves", so the association is not based on nothing:

https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper/blob/0524ffb3f6f1...

It is based on nothing. It is not intended to be offensive, and it is not intended to be about slavery. Similarly how master and slave pins are not either, or how blacklist and whitelist are not about race either!

BTW FreeBSD changed blacklistd to blocklistd. :(

I do not mind blocklistd, but then again, there was nothing wrong with blacklistd either.

I grant it's not nothing, but I think it's not enough of something to make changes over it. Thinking of a master record or similar is the natural reaction when you learn about the terminology, and most young people have never used bitkeeper, so unless you go out of your way to explain why this is "bad" most people won't even know, so what do you gain from it?

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