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Comment by PurpleFoxy | Hacker News Reader

Master bedroom, master record, master copy. The word master is just a synonym for main.

'Master bedroom' is going out of real estate descriptions, being replaced by 'main bedroom'. E.g. https://www.housebeautiful.com/lifestyle/fun-at-home/a1087/m... but that's just the first google hit, there's plenty out there.

In Dutch (both in .nl and .be), the English term 'master bedroom' was fashionable for a few years, until the stigma of that term carried over from the Anglosphere and it's now being replaced (in the woke areas of the country) with 'ouderslaapkamer', which is literally translated 'parent bedroom'. Although now that term itself is 'controversial' (not mainstream controversial, more in small hardcore circles, so I'm not sure if this will actually become an issue) because (to the best of my understanding of this objection) 'parent bedroom' implies that the 2-parents-with-children family form is normative (you can't make this up if you tried to), which it shouldn't be.

Not sure what my point is, maybe that using 'master' for 'main' is no longer outright commonly accepted usage?

About 'parent bedroom', a lot of houses are occupied by house-sharers these days. Some sharers get the 'parent bedroom', others get the non-parent bedroom but they are all the same age. It makes some sense to change the description.

That's a utilitarian argument (I think?) that I could get behind (not that anyone asks for my opinion on what rooms should be called). From that POV I guess it would be best to just call any room that isn't a kitchen or bathroom just 'room' and let buyers decide. But then again, most people don't have much imagination and like to be shown how space can or is intended to be used, much like how a neatly decorated house sells easier than an empty or cluttered one.

But the objections I read about last summer (tried looking but I can't find it any more) were moral, that the term is also 'oppressive' (not sure if that's the actual term they used, that was the gist of it), basically the same arguments that are made for removing 'master' from Git, language frames our thinking etc.

In the UK, lots of real estate descriptions side-step the problem completely and use terms like 'Bedroom 1' for the largest bedroom and 'Bedroom 2' etc for the 2nd largest.

I'd never heard of any stigma around the word 'master' until today... It's still as commonly used to refer to master bedrooms in Australia as it ever was...

In Ye Olde Dayes it referred to someone who had control or authority over a place, object, craft, etc -- a teacher would be a master for example. It's a common word across European languages, and certainly predated the atlantic slave trade.

Probably descended from the Latin word "magister", which (despite Rome having plenty of slaves) didn't neccersarilly refer to a slaveowner -- indeed many Roman slaves were Ludi Magister -- educated slaves that were teachers at Roman schools

Etymology of "master bedroom" seems to come from "Master's bedroom" in boarding schools, where it was the bedroom that the school master occupied (with Master having descended from Roman times)

It should be noted that of all of the ways master is used in this thread, master bedroom is pretty high up there in bad history and connotation. The etymology derives from the 'master of the house', a term which historically served to diminish the agency of wives, servants, and slaves. I don't know about master/main, but I could definitely get behind renaming master bedrooms.

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