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Comment by q3k | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps this discussion could be a opportunity to use the wording in a neutral fashion, letting yourself be okay with consciously and honestly using it, fighting against that looming feeling of unease?

That is, if your issue with this wording is only that it's subjectively, personally unpleasant to you for inner reasons, and not that you see it as actively harmful.

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The issue I noted is that most of the discussion surrounds an assumption--one that I happen to hold neither for people nor functions--that "colored" things are inherently bad, and that we have to defend the lack of badness of colored things... if you can't see why having to sit inside of that terminology cluster would make someone who separately has to spend a lot of time in arguments about race relations uneasy, I fear for your empathy :(.

I prefer calling a graph "colored" rather than "with a labeling of the graph’s vertices with labels such that no two vertices sharing the same edge have the same label". Sometimes my graph being colored will be a problem, sometimes it will be a good thing.

Note that is just a parallel with colored functions, the "colored" word does not mean the same thing here (the meaning of "colored" in graph theory has little to do with the one used in programming).

Nonetheless, if I think that using this word is upsetting to some group of persons, whether I understand their reaction or not, I try to avoid using it. On the Internet it's difficult, because we're addressing ourselves to a very large potential audience.

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