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Comment by robot_no_421 | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be a big hullabaloo about nothing. Language is a tool for communicating meaning; as long as the other person is understanding what you're saying then it's not that big a deal how the message was delivered. People get so offended over nothing. If some people don't want to use the words "mother" and "brestfeeding", so be it. I personally still use those terms because they feel right to me, and I don't plan on changing. But it doesn't bother me that other people are making the change.

If we just learned to communicate with each other and understand intent instead of getting so micro-aggrieved over how language is semantically used, we'd all be better off.

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Indeed, literally no one is saying people can't use these words if they identify with them either, it's just about using the most inclusive terms in the general sense by professionals trying to communicate with broad groups that will include edge cases.

This isn't even a "gender" issue, saying something like "people with a uterus" when it is the most accurate term helps cis women who have had hysterectomies know it isn't relevant to them. Of course, we should always inspect the impact of words: (e.g: maybe some people won't know their biology to know if they have a uterus, so we should clarify for them if that's a potential case), but the goal of being accurate rather than just making assumptions based on gender is obviously reasonable and beneficial as a base idea.

> Language is a tool for communicating meaning; as long as the other person is understanding what you're saying then it's not that big a deal how the message was delivered. People get so offended over nothing.

Would you be okay if a new religion came along that started casually referring to non-believers as heathens, pagans, and infidels? And referring to believers as "the saved"? And if such language were enshrined into law, and you could lose your job if you refused to use it?

Obviously not because the intent and the message behind those words would be clear. They would be choosing those words because they want to discriminate against non-believers by branding them as inferior.

There is no good faith argument to be had in why a religion would choose "heathen" as a description of a non-believer unless they mean it in a negative way. The message itself is clearly bad and the chosen language reflects it.

That's not the same as me calling a pregnant person a "pregnant woman" or someone else calling them a "uterus having pregnant person". The meaning in both cases is a biological female human who is carrying a baby in pregnancy. You can find people who will get offended by either phrase, but why? I don't get it. Neither phrase is meant to be disparaging or trivializing towards other people. If you hear "pregnant woman" you should assume that "woman" is meant in a biological sense and not a gender sense.

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