' We've not seen "tribe" on this sort of language list before. The INI wants it gone on grounds it "is a term that can be associated with colonialism or can be considered cultural appropriation" '

Tell that to the world doing "Octoberfests", and dressing up as Bavarians (not Germans!), and carricatures of Bavarians on top (and actually only from a small part of Bavaria). Can we have that banned? It mocks my (ok, I was born in a place that while being part of Bavaria poliltically is a relatively new addition to the state) cultural heritage, and carricatures Germans (not that there are not many things to mock Germans about, but still).

OK, I'm joking, but I still think it is super strange that people run around in canvas "leather" trousers, with cardboard "felt" hats. It feels like a Bavaria-LARP, and not a good one. At least give it a try to wear you own traditional garb, in Norway having a "bunad" (traditional dress / suite) is actually relatively common. Though that might be quite surreal, having e.g. people in traditional Japanese clothing to turn up to a Tokyo-Oktoberfest (if they have one....).

The web version of Outlook wanted me to change 'postman'. That option now disabled (can I still say 'disabled'?)

Definitely not, it's derogatory! Use "ability challenged" or some such...

As in "Outlook has always been ability challenged".

I've been using those terms for far too long and I ain't changing now. No one I know would use language that offends someone, but in a technology context they've all used these terms and more and not one person has been upset. I come from an age where a Transputer network used a farmer and worker system so that wouldn't have passed muster nowadays (Worker Power!)

I'm surprised that "daemon" isn't on the list as it could offend atheists or the religious. Or both. If it appears on v1.1 of the list I apologise now

I'm waiting for the curtain-twitching hand-wringers & namby-pambys to notice the 47 year old [1]Beastie [0] and raise a stink ... It's going to happen, it's only a matter of time.

[0] Where do the years go ...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_Daemon

They can safely be ignored. One young lady wore a Beastie T-shirt while ordering a take out meal in Texas. She escaped unharmed thanks to the courageous intervention of the shop owner.

[Thanks for the link. Did not know Beastie was created by [1]that Phil Foglio.]

[1] https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20021104

You had to post that link when I have some stuff due.

Some people....

There's already been a bit of controversy when the image for Beastie changed from a cartoon demon wearing daps to being a much more abstract red sphere with pointy ears.

"The INI suggests using other words to describe groups of people."

I can think of quite a few words to describe this particular group of people. At this rate they'll have us reduced to hand signals. I can think of one or two of those that might be appropriate, too.

All seems very Anglocentric. Doesn't seem very inclusive to me. Shouldn't the INI be looking at other languages for their alternative words? I'm sure 'schnapsidee' could be a good candidate for something.

These nutters are just steps away from attempting to ban all communications with people who speak gendered languages.

(Western) Norwegian it is actually gendered, just not the way you would expect. Thus, gender neutral language is really easy. There are two grammatical genders: neutrum and utrum (which is everything that is not a thing). Strictly speaking the utrum is grammatically identical to the masculinum[#] grammatical gender, but the femininum grammatical gender simply does not exist. Ok, except in personal pronouns (han / hun = he / she) which can be cobbled together to form the not too weird sounding new form "hen" (I think this is a Swedish idea).

When teaching university students in Germany I used to tell them that I personally find it rather difficult to get this right all the time (excuse me, I'm getting old), so when I say "Studenten" I usually use the generic masculinum gram. gender, which encompasses all, and that I would try to use the (non-existing, but hypothetical) generic femininum gram. gender equally often[*]. And anyway, that to me "students have no sex" (which, of course, is wrong in the technical terms of the debate, but helps break the ice and causes some mirth). I also tell them to contact me (or the student union guys/gals, some of them are in this lecture, I know) should they want me to make more of an effort. Or, in fact, with all things concerning the lecture. They did not complain (about that issue at least), so I found the issue to be not quite all that pressing. And I know people of all sorts of gender and orientation (or whatever the correct terms are), and most of them find the whole debate a bit silly - as if language would fix the actual issues (which we do need to address, in my opinion). Of course this was a some years ago. Maybe today the Dean would roast me, or the university's president, or the equal opportunity person.

[#] I use the Latin term to mark that I talk about grammar, not the other stuff, yeah, should be italicised, cannot be arsed. Sorry, not at all sorry.

[*] Not my idea. There is a maths book, which used to refer to the reader in the masculinum "der geneigte Leser....". The newer issues completely switched to femininum "die geneigte Leserin..." - and no, I did not feel excluded.

... how many problems are they going to create? For example, are they volunteering to pay for the reprinting and distribution of all the textbooks containing the words that must be sanitized/purified by this hyper politically correct insanity? What about all the existing documentation for equipment that might still be in use 40 years from now?

And of course SOMEBODY will have to pay to recycle all the "bad" textbooks so they don't fall into the wrong hands. Anyone fancy a career as a fireman?

What's worse, burning books or brainwashing the population with newspeak? Burning books inevitably leads to burning humans (read your history), but the idea of massive, wide-spread thought control by intentional language modification scares the ever loving shit out of me.

Proper documentation came in ring binders so that pages could be inserted or replaced!

I used to have two bookcases full of the things (one for the VAX systems, one for a PDP 11/45 that wasn't used but had to be retained) to update every month.

They actually seem to have done a decent job. Those top terms seem to be the most likely to be (i) offensive, (ii) widely used, and (iii) unnecessary. It is a short list and I am willing to do my bit to try to support it.

No need to change anything or burn any books. Just stop using the terms (unless you are deliberately wishing to cause offence) and use alternatives in future.

Frankly I am surprised by your comment - I would have put you down as quite a libertarian from your comments elsewhere, not as someone who wants to unnecessarily offend people.

Technical documentation is outdated the moment you carry it out of the bookstore. Who prints manuals anyway in this day and age? I just binned two shelves of old stuff that is no longer relevant. Went to recycling, will probably become bog rolls, at least then it is useful.

I sort of agree with you, Graham Cobb. Some of the words on the list really are at least questionable; not being American, and Norway not having had colonies - while having been occupied by Denmark for 400 years - I do not have the strong mental links[°]. There's also a bunch of children's books that use old fashioned and - to me - rather offensive terms when referring to black people, and they have been reprinted in a more modern language (acutally mostly removing the N***** word). I think this is reasonable. Or other books, just read, e.g. H.P. Lovecraft. That said, I think that we as educated adults should be able to enjoy such old literature, and put it in the correct societal and cultural context. I also think that we can easily have the lookup table in our heads that simply does a substitution when reading older (or newer) documentation. Heck, even I as a non-native English speaker can do that!

[°] Not having such a strong cultural link to the terms - English is for me mostly a technical language, a bit like... say... FORTRAN [*] - I have some inertia to change my language. Which is probably wrong.

[*] just kidding! It's more like Python[#]

[#] I actually do read English books, watch movies in English, listen to podcasts etc.

" Who prints manuals anyway in this day and age?"

Who reads manuals? In 1981 I wrote the manual for the accounting software the company sold. Somewhere I included "If you read this and contact me, I'll give your $10". I never had to pay out.

Strange that "whitelist" is on the list, but "blacklist" isn't; whilelist has been blacklisted :)

I'm pleased INI have seen sense and allowed kill, otherwise Unix users would be stuck.

IF I were using such terminology to insult, demean or otherwise make somebody uncomfy, I might see your point. But I am not. I am using technical terminology in a technical manner. Pay attention to the context, not that of some alternate universe.

Technical terms, when used by technical people, in a technical manner, are not inherently evil. They are the words that are used to describe something quite specific, in that context, and are used to avoid disambiguation.

People assuming that any word which might, in specific circumstances, be offensive to specific sets of people must therefore always be offensive to everybody in every context are the worst kind of censors ... they are trying to pervert the language to the point where nobody can communicate freely about anything.

What is truly offensive are the fuckwits who presume to be offended on the behalf of others. It's getting to the point where nobody can say anything about anything without somebody pretending to get upset about it in somebody else's name. Frankly, I find it grossly offensive that somebody might presume to be offended in my name. Be offended for yourself, by all means, but keep my good name out of your fantasy.

Insects are tired of being blamed for the programming mistakes of humans.

International Order of Hemipterans on line one ... Something about being tired of being lumped in with mere insects.

The title says it. This kind of nonsense should fail any sanity check and in my view the whole project should be aborted. How come "blacklist" is not on the list? Is INI trying to cripple meaningful communication?

Passing a confidence check implies you can be confident the result is correct. When something is called a sanity check the author is deliberately trying to not inspire confidence. Coherence covers a wide range - a tungsten filament light bulb has a much shorter coherence path length that a laser but can still be used to create interference patterns. A Florida man can speak incoherently and still get elected.

If the alternative is about as good as the current standard then I am happy to switch but otherwise I would rather concentrate on intent than a specific word. Boffin switches between a complement and an insult every few years. The intent comes from context. Substituting a synonym into context will likely have no effect on the intent.

If it is a quick check call it a "quick check". If it is a confidence check call it a "confidence check". Between the two, "the alternative is about as good as the current standard".

So, that one is easy - let's look at the actually more difficult ones...

I'd argue that Man in this context is supposed to be the general human being and not the human male, but first I'm sure that if they were intelligent enough to infer that they wouldn't have put that in a replacement list and second, it seems that Humanity is going to the dogs anyway, so why bother ?

Maybe it shouldn't be white US males handling this project. I think there should be some European, South American, Asian and African input as well. I don't feel part of the KKK when I say that a process is hung, or that I'm killing it.

English is mostly un-genendered when it comes to (pro)nouns and articles. Inclusive French seems to be getting more common. Stuff like 'iel' instead of 'il' or 'elle', and making a mish mash of gendered nouns. That's not so bad when it's just an 'e' at the end (so etudiant-e) but it looks a lot worse when the masculine and feminie versions differ more. For instance "Conducteur·rice de train" (train driver, copied and pasted from this ad https://metiers.siep.be/metier/conducteur-conductrice-train)

Blackhat/whitehat has nothing to do with race - it originated in the old black-and-white western movies, and was simply used to discriminate the "goodies" from the "baddies" in a way that they were visually distinct.

Just remember that when seen through problematic glasses EVERYTHING is sexist, EVERYTHING is racist and EVERYTHING is homophobic.

If they can make up a story that sounds convincing enough to similar minded people who are looking for something to be outraged at then it will be believed without question. The lie has gone around the world before the truth gets its shoes on.

Don't expect them to be logical. Those words contain "highly offensive terms" and have to go.

It's nice for people to start realizing the world isn't just black and white, but don't expect this to mean they won't have to burn the old to show their unfailing allegiance to the new truth.

After all "tolerance" and "understanding" are abstract notions most people don't really know the true meaning of (They aren't currently very fashionable anyway).

Hm, that still has the connotation of "white" demarking "pure" in Western (not the "High Noon" Western) culture. So... nah.

It probably goes back much further than that. Think about a small group of proto-humans a couple million years ago. Fearing the dark of night, because that's when the nocturnal predators hunted. The light of day brought relative safety. In other words "dark == bad, light == better" is embedded in our very genetics.

And let's not forget that those first early humans were undoubtedly dark skinned. The entire concept of dark vs light being a racist thing is laughable.

"All the world seems in tune on a spring afternoon when dis-tributing scones in the park..."

I remember reading about a science experiment where anthropologists visited a variety of of places/cultures and asked them about associations between things and colours. Almost universally black was associated with bad and white with good - even in cultures that had never been exposed to things like movies where the good cowboy sports a white stetson.

Ultimately, we are evolved from primitive folk who for millennia have associated the night/darkness with threats and danger, and day/light with relative safety. Similarly black clouds = rain, thunder, bad things....white clouds = pleasant weather, nice things.

Other colours tend to have associations too, such as red being commonly regarded as a 'danger' colour, possibly because of links with bleeding, fire/burning, etc., green with safety (pleasant green fields, nature, etc.) which have become engrained in DNA.

abort() is a C/POSIX standard function. Pretty hard to replace immediately. More like ‘gradually phase out in 40 years if you really put lots of effort into it’. But I guess they are not bothered by such little details.

"abort() is a C/POSIX standard function"

Be careful, it's illegal in some states...

Then perhaps the state machine needs some attention?

In the mid-late '80s I was a Yank working in a Yank company. Our software had an Abort command[0], and another Yank company asked us to change the name. We told them to fuck off.

No, really, our CEO called their CEO and asked if they were kidding about renaming abort. Their CEO indicated they were serious. Our CEO told him to fuck off. In those words. Their CEO sputtered and blustered. Our CEO asked him what part of "fuck off" did he misunderstand? Theirs sputtered and blustered some more. Our CEO laughed at him. Theirs finally hung up. Ours said "I was wondering how long I could keep the shithead on the line." Best conference call I ever sat in on :-)

[0] We also had kill, quit, stop and a few other, similar commands, each of which did a very specific thing.

Sure, abort would not have been on my list. But I am not someone who has researched the topic for years to find out what are the terms which cause the most distress. Fortunately, we have a group who have done the work for us!

No point arguing about what should be on the list. We have a list and it is quite short - let's work out how best to implement it.

The world changes, language changes. That's great - let's get on with living the change.

"We have a list and it is quite short - let's work out how best to implement it."

Joe "Tailgunner" McCarthy had a list, too. I didn't really want to see that list implemented, either. Thankfully, it didn't really exist. This one does, and thus it is even more evil.

Brainwashing is an ugly, ugly thing.

The terms ‘disable’ and ‘disabled’ are valid in the context of technology...

So why do other terms get blacklisted* in the context of technology?

I checked the list, I can still use that word.

Ban Save

Years of religious bigotry, patriarchy and fundamentalism right in front of me every day! If I had a soul then I'd do what I liked with it when I liked.