throwaway9221

Exactly. Or, say you're building some business logic and you need to make some exceptions for VIP partners. In times past, you would add these exceptions to a "whitelist" and have logic to check this list and apply the exception. Now, you need to be very careful to call this an "allowlist" lest the woke patrol pull you aside and warn you that your variable name is insensitive and non-inclusive. I wish I was joking.

It's not confined to universities, either. This growing list of "forbidden words" is making its way into the corporate world, too. Coupled with spineless HR who don't know how to constructively deal with people who claim to be offended. My current company is undertaking a massive, probably thousand man-year (sorry, person-year), effort to scrub all its internal and external documentation and even source code of any forbidden words, replacing them with, for now, non-triggering words. Not one person, to my knowledge has even politely questioned publicly whether this was a good use of company funds. If I was a shareholder I'd be outraged.

A small, core group of people loudly make this a huge issue of great importance, while the rest of us just want to get our work done and stay silent so we don't get fired by the woke patrol.

Honestly I can't wait until retirement when I don't have to constantly be walking on eggshells at work. It's sad--I used to love working in tech but it's insufferable now.