Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

[Eliot Lear <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

> 
>> But “master” isn’t a unicorn word. 
> 
> It's very common word with multiple meanings and applications.
> 


Herein lies the problem.  “Master” itself may not be a horrible word either. As we discussed on this list some two years ago, the entire basis of removing master/slave involves one anonymously reported incident and an essay by one person in a journal, who himself did an informal survey amongst a small number of friends and colleagues.  In that essay, Dr. Eglash did not claim his work to be dispositive, and so we should be careful about making such claims as well.

And it leaves us in a place where we truly do not know how to handle the next set of words.  And so some questions:

When is it reasonable to be offended by some language?
Have some number of people been offended by particular terms?
How do we test for this in some reasonable way?
What are the tradeoffs involving changes to language?  Remember, the point of language is to provide a stable means of communication.  That’s not to say it shouldn’t evolve, but we would be foolish to not examine the costs.
What other changes should we be making as an organization? (Not that this should block language changes, but if we only change language I fear we may fall short of any sort of goal toward inclusiveness we might have.)

Some phrases are obviously worse than others.

And I would point out that none of us involved in this discussion are experts on any of this (that includes the draft authors).  One aspect of taking on this work is that we really need to go get those people to participate.

Eliot