However, I think it is a bit to aggressive in listing unacceptable terms. I understand "off the reservation" because that still has a direct connection to racist origin. There is a defensible argument that it is referring directly to many atrocities that the United States government committed when moving Native Americans to reservations. Fine.
However, whitelist? That's just based off of a color. There's nothing directly racist about it. I'm sure some people feel uncomfortable when the word is used, but there's no logical reason why it should be a problem.
Just because one person is uncomfortable about a phrase doesn't mean the phrase is bad. I once had to leave the room when watching a movie because it had a scene that reminded me very strongly of an traumatic experience I had. However, there is no objective problem with the movie. I am not the main character of the universe, and it is not anyone else's fault that other things remind me of the trauma I experienced.
I don't believe people should be put in environments that are actively triggering, but "native feature"? There is no logical reason to be triggered by that.
This type of rhetoric is problematic because it vilifies people unnecessarily. Killing a process is fine, because processes aren't people. I'm not being violent. If you see the word "kill" and get distracted, that's a problem with your reading comprehension.
All in all, I agree that documentation should not be triggering or have terrible connotations. However, many of the words here are not triggering, and they do not have terrible connotations.
Meanwhile in my language, every word has a gender, from table to banana, should I then be triggered by gender neutrality, a concept that "destroy my gender-heavy culture"? :D
Singular they is fine when you dont know the gender, it's true it's weird to favor masculine, or what I see in English favoring feminine. But putting your fav gender in email signature is a bit like... is it truly such a massive problem that everyone must comply and not just people for whom it's not clear ? Im not saying it s not a problem, just is it that massive ?
Meanwhile in German they're trying to define RegExp, which is also pronouncable, for gender-inclusive words[1], since they differentiate between e.g. Pilot (male) and Pilotin (female) as well as Piloten (many pilots, in the old days this used to mean of mixed genders, but some people felt excluded) and Pilotinnen (many female pilots).
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/30/1049603171/germany-gender-neu...
sister campus or grandfathered seems different, its not gendering a person, but an inanimate object or an action. in the case of the latter, the gender has nothing to do with the person performing the grandfathering. maybe its because the words have an endearing quality to them that substituting them feels like a loss. not sure how i feel about native meaning innate being stricken from available usage. a bridge too far maybe. does the concept of gender really need to be 100% eliminated from all speech?
maybe this comment will age poorly when someday i realize the error of my thoughtprocess.
Interestingly enough, one I think we should get better about IS present in the guide, albeit as part of their description and NOT something you shouldnt say. "When referencing users with disabilities..." The word users sounds like drug users, addicts etc. When talking about people, I have tried very hard to drop the word user from my vocabulary, purely out of respect and politeness. They/we are people. (In IT circles, user almost always has an additional very very slight to heavy pejorative tone to begin with. It implies lesser in some way, or an us/them tribalism, even if people saying it dont understand they are doing it.) The same should go for drug users. They are people.
* blocklist/blacklist, I find blocklist clearer because it does what it says. Same for whitelist
* master/main, same as above, main describes it's function more accurately.
Regarding the genger wording, I have memories as a child where I was confused because for some reason, only the boys where adressed. Not thinking it through, I simply assumed that was intentional. And thus, if a teacher said 'boys, lets go that way!' I would be arguing with the girls since I thought they where not supposed to follow along.
Of course, this is not the case for ALL proposed inclusive language. I simply notice that most of the time, the inclusive alternative is a lot clearer.
https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/Bloc...
My suggestion would be that if you're allergic to "black" for some reason you go with "redlist", giving you "greenlist" and "amberlist" as alternatives. But I don't personally have a problem with "blacklist".
BTW: Blacklist has nothing todo with skincolor:
~1183 AD Andronicus -> "His memory was stored with a black list of the enemies and rivals, who had traduced his merit, opposed his greatness, or insulted his misfortunes"
Even if that were true, you could say the same thing about English spelling reform (which is never going to happen, for good reason).
We're fighting hard in my company against the same people as usual now brigadding to stop saying black/whitelist, because it does nothing to help black people in America (we're in Asia), who suffer from problems which go well beyond even white people: they entered a cycle of self defeatism where every problem has an external source and therefore solution, to the point of complete apathy.
So when a chinese says "this system is a blackbox" I will not, me a European, tell him to say something else because americans cant fix their shit and now need to pretend me and that chinese guys are part of their problem. It's THEIR problem, they fix it, and for real.
According to this inclusive language guide, you should say "this system is a functional testing" or "this system is an acceptance testing."
Pretty soon we will just not be allowed to mention colors anymore in any context. Just refer to it by its hex code. "this system is a #000000 box."
Is low-hanging fruit still an inclusive term? Or it discriminates against short people? Cancel it?
Tone deaf doesn't begin to describe the people who come up with these not-so-voluntary, thought-crippling "guides".
The same statement is true for my native language, French, where I'll never use the "écriture inclusive" bullshit except to mock it. Luckily the Académie is with me on this one.
And that master thing is really stupid, like every population has been enslaved at some point, the word comes from the romans, and it's not like anyone is promoting slavery by saying their master branch dominate their slave branches in git. We also still enslave animals and we can say "human friend" instead of "master" to indicate your relationship with your dog, you're still not asking him for tax advices.
And should we stop saying Maitresse for kids' teachers as well to avoid remiding everyone of slavery...
I can't think of any race, creed, gender, sexuality or other group that is excluded from having to clean their house?
I’ll mostly use these documents to remind me to use these terms more. What the fuck is wrong with “native”, “housekeeping”, “sanity”? The authors of this surely must be joking.
Then, when you could have said
"point out"
"highlight", or
"bring attention to"
you instead choose to say
"call out"
which is the same phrase used to mean "publicly denounce (typically on Twitter)".
Do you know what you're doing?
Are you trying to make your coworkers remember that they can be stoned by the crowd at any moment? To imply that you can cause that to happen?
In a world where wordgames become very serious surprisingly quickly, I wonder.
Best morning ever.
