Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

[Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Jul 24, 2020 at 03:24:10PM +0000, Salz, Rich wrote:
> >    and 20 years from now we're sitting on exactly the same mail thread and argue
>     about replacing min and sec.
> 
> That's fine.  Language evolves.  As do standards.  Nobody will ever need more than 640Kb.  Nobody will ever need more than 32bits of IP address.  Why should a document be different?

But that's different. The problem is to recurringly changing the words for
the same subject because a prior word was abused AFTER it was choosen to
address the subject.

There is a good amountd of justice for this euphemism treadmill when a new
word is picked as a euphemism without the problematic nature of the underlying
subject to be resolved. But in our case the situation is different. Our
subjects are never the ones with problematic subject matter. Its only that
our words are typically metaphors for subjects where either the original subject
is problematic, or the use of the word for the original subject has attained
_some_ negative connotations.

Cheers
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