Of course, people aren't necessarily using the terminology completely correctly as it is.
And then there's the connectors on fancy RF equipment that can assume either role!
To anyone else - wholeheartedly recommend woodgears.ca & https://www.youtube.com/c/Matthiaswandel/videos. The former's been discussed a few times too: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... (But again, because it's of general HN-type engineering-y interest - not all 'just' woodworking - not because it has any relevance to this particular submission.)
One of the shining examples of body shaming and societal opression of sexual expression is the recent push of changing the naming of audio plugs as "male" and "female", calling this naming "gross" and "problematic", as if genitalia was something to be ashamed of instead of treating it as a natural an everyday thing.
OK I'm not very good at this, I'm sure someone from the Guardian could do a much better job.
If there's a mixture, is plug & socket any clearer?
Of course not. Although this isn't sociology and shouldn't be blamed on the field. Yes, they have these guys, but it is a minority. It is just a silly group of industry partners.
It's not really my place to be asserting that it's not offensive or causing harm, when it costs very little to be less offensive and more precise.
Imagine if you will a world in which every individual starts changing what they call things on a whim every day. You run into a Tower of Babel problem, and one that at best, stabilizes to a dynamic equilibrium i.e., the problem never stops, it just changes from thing to thing. Symbol changes have cost. That cost quickly amplifies in terms of required reconciliation and update of protocol across the entire human network. That means across languages, cultures, education systems, etc.
What you'll find, is this seriously grates against a bunch of people way more interested in getting work done and being understood without being on receiving end of This Week's Polemic at the same time.
This may sound callous or cold, but there is a reason society does not wholesale rewrite foundational communication structures/cultures/techné/art/etc... on a whim, and when it does happen, it's not just because a small group gets a marginal bump, but the change warrants such a bump in overall benefit or actualizable horizons of possibility, that it becomes worth the chaos of adapting to the change and shepherding it along.
Every individual may think they only have to pay or exact a one time cost but that quickly compounds.Think of all the times you end up saying "You know what I mean?" and the recipient goes on to demonstrate they do. This is one of those cases where one can only really justify change having a trivial cost in the presence of ascribing a value modifier of 0 or less to tradition, instead of actually accounting for all the instances of questions that don't need to be asked, because there is an instinctual, endemic response. While one or another person looking at themselves in isolation may see the cost as trivial to enact in their local sphere of influence, it exacts a non trivial cost in the overall context of human to human communication over time.
Note, I'm not saying no one should try to change these types of things. To do so, or try to is the essence of politics; I'm merely pointing out that the only way you see no cost is if you did count a whole lot of other implicit dependencies elsewhere as not significant.
You do you, but reality has a way of making it hurt when people do that.
purely a PR move.
> “Shoutout to PAMA for introducing neutral language for the audio industry,” said Karrie Keyes, Executive Director of the women-in-audio advocacy group SoundGirls.org, as well as monitor engineer for Pearl Jam/Eddie Vedder. “This is a tremendous undertaking and is important to continue working toward meaningful changes in our industry.”
People have done research by asking people what they think about such gendered terms, and people in the less represented gender (in whichever situation you are talking about) tend to dislike them.
I'm just saying waving away the need for proving points before taking acion is doing more harm than good
I can see a possibility that it had real utility in communicating concepts across completely, different languages, where using the words socket and plug might have caused confusion and more time spent in translation.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32861597805.html
technically gender neutral... although I find the double head a bit indecent...
Anyway, the point is, "male" and "female" made immediate sense. "plug" and "socket" don't seem to be exact analogues. When I think of a socket, I think more of things that are more permanent things like wall sockets or sockets on actual computers etc. Is there any reason to assume that all such things will always be receptacles? When I look at this picture[1], I see a set of "female" sockets next to a "male" socket using the disfavored terminology. As English is my second language, I do not know whether I should refer to the one that is "male" as a plug.
Another aversion I have to the general tendency to changing language by decree is the fact that I experienced the linguistic impoverishment visited upon the Turkish language as a result of the 20th century effort to remove words of Arabic and Farsi origin and somehow arrive at a "pure" language. Such efforts rarely lead to where their designers want them to go.
[1]: https://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2007/08/inlet...
_priz_ is "prise" (socket). _fiş_ is "fiche" (plug). The thing is that both can be either male or female.
> When I think of a socket, I think more of things that are more permanent things like wall sockets or sockets on actual computers
That's definitely the case. A "prise" is a wall socket and a "fiche" is on a wire. I believe it's the actual definition of the terms.
Back in the days of RS232, I owned a cable known as a "gender-bender". This was long before the days of Boy George. It was 8" long, and had a female DB-25 connector on each end. These things were also known as "eight-inch couplers", a term into which you could also read sexual connotations.
I don't like people that advocate for language regulation, because they cannot even justify their positions, they just try to force it on others and wonder about the negative feedback.
"I doesn't cost much" is often an argument, but it remains silly from start.
A great many, perhaps a majority, don't do anything to their bodies at all. They change their clothes, their pronouns, their hair, and their lifestyles, but have no surgery or medicines. They live in society as their gender, and anything that's seen only by the people they're intimate with are a subject for discussion between them.
The result is that yes, there are a fair number of men with vaginas and women with penises. Which doesn't matter to you unless you're either their doctor or their lover, but it's important to recognize that it is in fact the case.
Company likes speech codes and NDAs, but this is just idiotic.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Leviton-15-Amp-125-Volt-Locking-...
"To put it more simply – neutral language is always better for technical terminology, because it’s clearer, more accessible to more people, and includes the people who provide the talent and skills that make industries and technologies work. End of story."
Note that we already have 'couplers' that allow 'mating' female-female or male-male cable ends, so I think any argument that it's homophobic language or whatever is on thin ground. Really the only valid (if I can call it that) argument against it is the author's 'eewwww', but.. really?
