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Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

John R Levine <johnl@taugh.com> Sun, 09 August 2020 16:28 UTC

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Date: Sun, 09 Aug 2020 12:28:54 -0400
Message-ID: <aa4292e-79a6-3df4-9bc3-18558ba2c190@taugh.com>
From: John R Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
To: Stewart Bryant <stewart.bryant@gmail.com>
Cc: IETF general list <ietf@ietf.org>
Subject: Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language
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>> I have no idea where one might find international experts on technical
>> language, if such people even exist.
>>
> We could ask the OED people if they can point us such experts. It is possible that some of the to University English departments could point us in the right direction.

Dictionaries are descriptive; they describe language as people use it and 
what the words mean in current usage.

We're talking about prescriptive rules.  I don't think our problem is that 
we don't understand what "slave" means.

> We can and should consult with the editors of the other major SDOs.

I suppose but I can't ever recall a time when we believed that the way 
that the IEEE or W3C or ANSI or ITU wrote their documents was the way we 
should write our documents.  (If we're going down that path, we can ditch 
our tools in favor of MS Word.)

This is a problem that the IETF really needs to solve itself.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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