As an unfortunately pedantic person, it really bothers me that blacklist and whitelist get caught up in all this. Like, yeah, I can see why people think it's related to skin colour, and I can see the argument that even if it wasn't originally about skin colour, it leaves an impression of "white good, black bad" regardless of its original intentions. But fuck do I wish we didn't call white people white and black people black. It's not accurate, and would solve a whole bunch of these "colour-related phrases becoming racial" problems. We should just stop using colours to refer to people! But that ship has long sailed, and its harder to advocate in that direction, so I guess I'm fine with it. But I can dream π
Also "master" has other uses, like a Master Sculpter making a masterpiece, and more relatedly things like the "master tape" being the tape other tapes are copied from, a la "remastered". But I concede it's pretty hard to make that argument when DBs and BIOSes have "masters" versus "slaves" π¬π




I think we agree more than we disagree, but are at different points on the spectrum. For example:
This isn't meant as a "gotcha", but in this paragraph about not drawing a line, you drew a line. You decided aardvark was obviously too far, and that that PR should be rejected. How you feel about aardvark is how most of us already feel about the word "stupid".
But more broadly:
I think most people (in this community, on this thread) are not pro hurting people. What I feel is more like: if you are hurt by the word "stupid", or self-identify as stupid, you should not. No one is using it as a slur against your people. There are slurs! They exist, it's just that this isn't one of them, in the way people mean it. And so I feel like, in this case, at this point in the spectrum, these people should heal themselves rather than change software / the culture / the world to suit their insecurities.
If course it's a squishy grey area, but if I found the word aardvark offensive because some kids called me aardvark at school growing up or something and bullied me, that's tragic, and it's very real for hypothetical me, but that's something I should work through in therapy, rather than something I should make the concern of everyone around me. In my opinion. And I feel like being triggered by the word "stupid" is in the same category, also in my opinion.
If anything, and I'm stepping in bees again, it feels kind of egocentric to see someone write "replies are stupid" in their own code, in response to presumably their opinion about a standard or spec or something, and to see they've written that and think "this is about me".