'Master' and 'slave': Tech terms face scrutiny amid anti-racism efforts

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

I've just created a new repo in gitlab and the master branch is still called master. Don't know about GH as I'm staying away since the day M$ bought it. I did the same with Skype and LinkedIn.

They're also in the process of killing Atom in favor of VSC.

[bd139]

Yeah they are probably patching it now.

Discovered the word "crybullying" which describes this shit perfectly.

[coppice]

Github and Gitlab gave in. Since apparently you shouldn't name the default branch master anymore.

The master baiters have won.

When will they be coming for those Masters degrees?

[Simon]

Github and Gitlab gave in. Since apparently you shouldn't name the default branch master anymore.

The master baiters have won.

When will they be coming for those Masters degrees?

 
 
 
 
 

[Cerebus]

Github and Gitlab gave in. Since apparently you shouldn't name the default branch master anymore.

The master baiters have won.

When will they be coming for those Masters degrees?

Well, you could always have a Mistress degree.   

Some good number of years ago a lass was promoted to being a director at the company I was then working at. She insisted that she was not called a "director" but a "directrix" because the word is Latin derived and to call her by an explicitly male name was linguistically wrong (cf dominator/dominatrix). She also used to rail against the then fashion of renaming "chairman" to "chairperson" - quoth her: "What's wrong with 'chairwoman', you scared of someone with tits having the job little boy?". I didn't like her very much before that particular rant but I warmed to her a lot after it.

On the subject of Master/Mistress, Mistress always used to have a connotation of being in charge - "May I speak to the Mistress of the house?". With "Mistress" taking on a sexual connotation in recent years this usage has rather fallen by the wayside. I find it faintly amusing that that the modern usage, to refer to a (generally covert) female lover, quietly carries the old meaning with it, "we know who's really in charge". 

[bd139]

Chairperson is easier than cis-chairwoman and chairattackhelicopter 

I actually looked after the gender drop drop down list on a web site for a bit. That got complicated quickly.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

Yo, the whiteys want "main", gonna git branch -m master white cuz that's the shit for real bro.

[Simon]

On the subject of Master/Mistress, Mistress always used to have a connotation of being in charge - "May I speak to the Mistress of the house?". With "Mistress" taking on a sexual connotation in recent years this usage has rather fallen by the wayside. I find it faintly amusing that that the modern usage, to refer to a (generally covert) female lover, quietly carries the old meaning with it, "we know who's really in charge". 

a Norman Wisdom film made a gag out of this. He joins a wealthy household as a window cleaner. another servant that does not like him directs him into a party being held by the mistress of the house when he asks for the staff room. unawares of where he is when asked if he knows the lady of the house he declares that she is his mistress just as she arrives to faint.

I think the gag was that to an upper class person and a working class person had simultaneously different definitions of the word mistress.

[magic]

Git mailing list thread: https://public-inbox.org/git/9accf436-4b7a-2de2-de79-e81ec090dfc9@gmail.com/T/#ma9a4da070ddf8ff87729960bb31ce2a8776c73c1

We've also seen "default" floated and it exists in mercurial, but we've also heard feedback that it's potentially sensitive due to financial default.

Where is the Rocket Man when we need him?

[coppice]

Git mailing list thread: https://public-inbox.org/git/9accf436-4b7a-2de2-de79-e81ec090dfc9@gmail.com/T/#ma9a4da070ddf8ff87729960bb31ce2a8776c73c1

We've also seen "default" floated and it exists in mercurial, but we've also heard feedback that it's potentially sensitive due to financial default.

Where is the Rocket Man when we need him?

Depending how you draw these trees, "extreme left wing" might be a suitable term.

[Cerebus]

Chairperson is easier than cis-chairwoman and chairattackhelicopter 

Oh, so you've met Jenny (for that was her name). 

[vodka]

Yeah they are probably patching it now.

Discovered the word "crybullying" which describes this shit perfectly.

"Crybulling" or "snowflake" labeling are  too soft. They are groups rather seemed to "SA" , "brown shirt" of the Nazi Germany or  The Red Guardian of the Communist Regimes. These groups are based just grievance for imposing
their dictatorship of the unique-thought. They aren't scrupulous ,if the coercion via "emotion" doesn't work , they pass to bully and overthrow . And last stage if the others don't work is the civil death .It means
what you turn in pariah. That implicate in example ,you are hard to achieve a job or join association.

[Nominal Animal]

Do note that in this context, "racism" means "perceived or emoted oppression by white people".  According to how these people define the term, racism against white people is impossible, because racism is structural, and white people oppress everyone else in structured environments. For the same reason, racism against Asians only matter if it is perpetrated by "whites", not if by "brown" or "black" people.

None of this is sane.  None of this will have a positive long-term outcome.

I have already prepared my arguments for the next time I encounter people espousing this shit.  I will present them my own plan for protected safe spaces for each group that perceives themselves to be threatened or suppressed: As Parts in Our Own Communities, or apartheid for short.

[tom66]

Oh dear, blacklist and whitelist are included in that "ban" as well. 

I better rebuild my FPGA design.  Far too many references to AXI4 Master and AXI4 Slave.  The electrons might be offended.

[Nominal Animal]

I wonder how these people would react, if they met a BDSM couple, a pasty white bald older male with a jet-black, shaved young woman, with the latter the submissive one in heavy spiked chains?  (Rule 34.)

Would they call police?  Or just grab whatever pointy sticks they had, and kill the guy?  Everything in that couple is against the core beliefs of these people.  Would they accept this mixed-race couple?  Could they?

Oh man, this would make excellent street performance!

[tom66]

My girlfriend is black (I am a pasty-white male) and we've already received strange comments.  She thinks most of this is bullshit from well intentioned people that don't have a clue.  That's not to say she hasn't experienced racism and discrimination but it's mostly from people practicing it actively (i.e. assholes) and not passive/pervasive in nature.

[Monkeh]

My girlfriend is black (I am a pasty-white male) and we've already received strange comments.  She thinks most of this is bullshit from well intentioned people that don't have a clue.

Isn't it interesting how those well intentioned people are, as it turns out, actually racists.

[tkamiya]

I'm going to suggest, rather than fixing idiom, names, words, phrases, symbolism, etc, etc, etc, pay more attention to and make a best effort to fix the real issue, which is the racism itself.

I am Asian.  My girlfriend is white American.  Her daughter is white.  The daughter's husband is also white.  My grand child is black.  Our holiday dinner looks like a cafeteria at United Nations!

[PlainName]

(Gosh, this is a fast mover.)

To be clear, this discussion is academic. The terms are not going away.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. Just needs some Big Ones, such as Google or Git* or similar, to have a policy and over time it will happen. People will just get fed up of swimming against the stream and conform. The only issue is whether the critical mass that introduces the current will be reached, and that's why the big repo holders or code sources are significant. It will REALLY happen if the Linux kernel gets changed.

[tom66]

As a good friend of mine says, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."  I do believe most of the people pushing these ideas are well-intending folk, but they have the wrong approach.

[nuclearcat]

I dont know if i will open new page of hell, but word "robot" is invented in Czech, and derived from "robota" which is translated "slave(ry) work".
(grabbing pop-corn)

[TimFox]

And the standard greeting 'ciao' derives from the Venetian phrase s-ciào vostro or s-ciào su literally meaning "I am your slave".  That's not the meaning in conversational Italian, however.

[Nominal Animal]

The play R.U.R. by Karel Čapek introduced the word "robot" to English and dozens of other languages in the 1920s.  A classic.

The Finnish word for slave is 'orja', apparently derived from the Indo-Iranian 'Aryan'.  Yes, the word that in English is nowadays equated to white supremacy, has literally the same roots as the word 'slave' in Finnish.  (Finns were widely sold as slaves as far as Arabia.)

We don't have a simple word for 'master' in the master/slave sense; only things like 'orjapiiskuri' (one who whips slaves).  Even the word 'pomo' (boss) is from Russian помощник (pomóšnik), which means helper or assistant..  Finnish is weird, and may explain why some Finns like me have difficulties with other languages and concepts common in other languages.

(A book about old Finnish names mentions that a few hundred years ago, there was an originally Swedish merchant in Turku/Åbo who changed his name to a Finnish one, but was.. pranked by the locals.  You see, his name, 'Sianpillu', literally translates to 'A pig's vagina'.)

[tooki]

And, just for you to know, abolishing speaking about things won't make things go away.  I was under impression that racial thing in USA is NOT that bad (I'm not from USA so I don't know how things are there), BECAUSE it is NOT PC to talk about it. For years, USA lies to rest of the world about this topic, by deliberately omitting information about it in mainstream media.

I am American. The thing to understand here is that the US wasn’t knowingly telling untruths to the rest of the world. The US was lying to itself about the state of racism. In particular, the white US kept telling itself racism was over, while the black US kept saying “no, it isn’t!”, but we basically ignored it because we’d been telling ourselves “we abolished segregation, so it’s done”. We believed it, but it was wrong. It was still there, hidden. Omnipresent video recording showed us racism was still around. And the current president brought it to a head by telling the racists that it was OK to be publicly racist — for decades, it had been something you admitted to behind closed doors. Now they wear it as a badge of pride.

Ultimately, though, the important lesson (and one I think a LOT of forum members here need to really take to heart) is that if a minority is telling us they feel oppressed, we need to listen, not dismiss it.

We may not agree on how to solve the problem, or whether we have to make a specific change. But it’s callous and arrogant to wholesale dismiss the grievances, as happens here on the forums every single time a progressive social issue is raised.

[TimFox]

The difference now is that before 1954, racial segregation was not only legal, but it was mandatory in many places.  That was progress, but socially there is a great deal left to do.
Alexis de Tocqueville noted this problem even before the Civil War, in the chapter "The Three Races of North America" in his classic "Democracy in America" (1835), and was pessimistic about an eventual solution.
By the way, Nominal Animal, does "orjapiiskuri" literally mean "overseer" or "supervisor" in Finnish?