Re: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

I’ve got two stories here that may or may not be relevant.

(1) In CP360, an early IBM operating system, there was a command to terminate a virtual machine.   Originally, that was called KILL.   IBM changed that to FORCE at some kind, because KILL seemed too harsh.   I don’t think anyone was “offended” by KILL, but this is still a very American way to say this (e.g., we don’t normally “kill" things in the German language).   UNIX still uses “kill” for terminating (sending a signal to) a process, but here it helps that process names are just numbers, while in CP360 they were text names and often just were the name of the responsible person, so the command might very well have been “KILL CARSTEN”.  I’m not sure “FORCE CARSTEN” is that much better, though...

(2) When we set up our first official DNS name server here in Bremen, of course I wanted to name it “ns.<domain>”.  That was in the early 1990s, and I got lots of push back.  This was in Germany, and “NS” had been the short form of “NSDAP” 50 years ago and was thus simply not something a German would ever want to say again.  Of course there is no link between naming computer servers and names of political parties, but still this felt weird.  Again, nobody would have been “offended” by this choice of name, it just felt extremely weird to a German.  We got over that, and our name servers are now happily chugging along as “ns.<domain>” (and generally, the taboo status of certain words and abbreviations has certainly softened after another 25 years or so — we can even say “national” again without blushing).

So maybe we shouldn’t reduce the question of the proper appropriation of words from another semantic domain, to whether someone somewhere currently chooses to be offended by them or not, but maybe also think about whether we want to look like that insensitive clod to a particular community or we actually don’t have a reason to care.

(And yes, there are many, many communities that each one of us is not a part of and doesn’t even begin to understand what makes you an insensitive clod in that community.)

Grüße, Carsten