Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

In article <[e-mail]> you write:
>I support this draft being adopted as a starting point, but I would like to see some substantial changes.  I have said this in other contexts, and I will
>say it here: what is needed is not a dictate on specific words, but rather a well-understood framework by which we decide these sorts of things.  I suggest
>that we do what we can to attract appropriate expertise into a working group to participate.

Yes, exactly. I already sent a note to gendispatch saying that while I
concur with the general goals of draft-knodel-terminology I disgree
with pretty much all of the details.

With respect to whose responsibility this is, it absolutely has to be
the entire community, and definitely *not* something that waits until
a document gets to the RFC Editor. I have no interest in a job that
will be perceived by some authors as Language Policeman, and it is not
something I would ask our contractors at the RPC to do.

I would also not underestimate the mental effort involved in keeping
our documents clear and readable while also avoiding undesirable
metaphors. It is not somthing that mechanical tools can do -- while
there are certainly some words that shouldn't ever appear in RFCs, I
doubt many of them appear anyway. There are lot of words which are
entirely defined by context such as "master" where the authors need
to think about what they're trying to say.  No tool can do that for us.

R's,
John