Re: USA dominion: Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

Toerless,

as a fellow with a German background, let me just say this:

It’s their language.

We are witnessing a change in what is polite to say in English.
Many of us would simply ignore that — engineers are not often connoisseurs of finer points of English, and we value clarity over politeness.
The suggestion is to follow the change(*).

I have already made my point that some of the well-meaning changes that have previously occurred didn’t stick.  That (and the cost of change) argues for caution, not for ignoring the change.

And to bring in the (Northern, in my case) German perspective:
We generally have a rather robust relationship to language, even if some people are chipping away at that.
But then, we also have words that we no longer use (it took me a couple of years to call a name server  ns.tzi.org  — 25 years ago that choice was still nearly unthinkable, even if that sounds ridiculous now).
It also would *never* have occurred to a German to call a technical concept a “slave” (**), or to “kill” processes (***), etc., so the German speaker in me is not too unhappy if some of those horrible usages finally get fixed.

Grüße, Carsten


(*) I don’t think anybody is suggesting to lead it, although I may simply have ignored those who do.
(**) the German equivalents of “master” are mostly innocuous, including great ones like “Herrchen” and the analogous “Frauchen” (of an animal).  We also have completely non-charged variants, such as “Meister”.  So the German in me doesn’t understand the urge to replace “master”, but then again, it’s their language.
(***) insert account of IBM’s somewhat comical choice to replace “kill” by “force” in CP/CMS.