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Comment by soneca | Hacker News Reader

There is no “we” trying to change. Individual people just start doing it, then it catches on, and then the meaning has already changed for a lot of people.

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Yet decades after it got a new meaning, we can't use "master" as a branch name because it had a different meaning in 1800.

No, you can still and should still use master and slave in the non-human slave contexts because that's how you hold the line against irrationality - and not coddle that unreasonable crowd.

To some those words have a hurtful meaning. You may consider them irrational, but they would consider you irrational.

I question the amount of people who find "master" in computing truly hurtful. The activist demographic pushing to change the terminology is exceedingly small, and I simply don’t see much authentic pressure from the masses behind it, unlike in the case of other terms that are now eschewed.

Also, once one is aware of etymology as a science, changing "master" in this context does seem irrational: in very many languages the general word for "mister, sir" and the word used for "master to a slave" are identical, and are we to change all these terms of address, too?

I really like Mental Outlaw's take on this push against "offensive" language and toward "inclusive" language: https://youtu.be/tx2v0Y9Ci7I

Maybe they're too fragile.

That's an emotional reaction and not grounded in logic because they're not differentiating the contexts. Differentiation, boundaries and context with words and language, is something then they need to learn - and if you coddle them, they're not going to learn that - so you're actually doing a disservice to them and society.

If a child is having a temper tantrum because you won't let them taste the bleach, you don't give in to let them taste the bleach.

And re: they will consider my response irrational - I just explained it with logic, and there is truth and logic - you don't fold to that behaviour just because someone's emotional maturity is underdeveloped or blocked - likely from coddling and adults in their life not being integral to hold boundaries for certain types of thinking/behaviour; this has lead to what's considered a neoliberal group - the same extreme exists on the conservative side as well, though it manifests differently.

Sure you can and plenty of people still do.

I do use master for branches. I use also master and slave.

But, outside of tech, the meaning of slave did not changed one big. I did not seen "master" anywhere except master slave relationship (whether history or bdsm).

So I find theory that calling these two master and slave is unrelated to historical slavery implausible. People who use it first time being inspired by that seems most plausible origin of that name.

The etymology of "master" goes back at least to the Latin "magister" meaning "teacher", and is used in a multitude of contexts where one person is recognized as having some kind of revered knowledge or authority about some topic.

While I don't agree with the position that the word "slave" be expunged from tech for some putative role in trivializing historical slavery either, at least the argument does have a plausible premise. The anti "master" crowd though is laughably ignorant of language.

Well, if you start arguing this way, then you can also go all the way back and muse about what the word meant in Proto-Indoeuropean.

It's still obvious that the modern use of the master/slave combo comes from centuries of slavery, not from any prior meanings. As OP said, that can be shown by studying their meanings outside the technical context. The original meaning was retained in Academia but merely as jargon. Magister artium is a "master degree." There is no "slave degree", though. There is also "mastery", master/apprentice, and so on.

In other words, the offensive component of the combo is "slave", not "master." You can safely continue to use the master/apprentice combo.

There is no “slave branch” in git either.

Master is used in many contexts in English that have nothing to do with slavery. The first definition given by the OED is “a person or thing having control or authority”.

An arbitrarily chosen quotation: “ M. le Comte Benedetti, French Ambassador at Berlin..sped to Vienna with the latest proposal of his master.”

Certainly, this ambassador Count Benedetti was not a slave.

Title was changed, it was: "How long should we cling to a word's original meaning? (2011)" - clearly containing the word "we", thus implying a "we".

It can even happen at the level of subculture-specific words (possibly NSFW depending on your W): https://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiff

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