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Comment by starbugs | Hacker News Reader

> I am in favor of inclusion

How have we arrived at a point where we have to make such defensive statements when no offense was ever intended? Isn't it upon those wanting to change the language to defend their arguments and bring forward thorough evidence that the intended changes will justify the costs (along with an analysis of what the real costs are)? And do we believe that we can create a language that can still work for meaningful communication while simultaneously ensuring that no one can possibly ever be offended?

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> Isn't it upon those wanting to change...

No. It isn't anymore. Because the loud minority now has the means to globally and publicly destroy you if you say something they dislike. You might lose your job or even your personal safety because of a statement that can be interpreted in some way that someone doesn't like.

Be realistic, not a single person will suffer consequences for continuing to say "white space".

Perhaps not whitespace, but I think people insisting on using blacklist or master-slave terminology in computing will actually see direct consequences. Plenty of big tech companies have made their engineers scrub such words from their internal codebase, even going so far as to rename the master branch of Git to main.

I am pretty sure that an employee insisting not to abide by this mandate would be reprimanded and even fired if they don't stop.

https://online.stanford.edu/masters-degrees

https://ed.stanford.edu/academics/masters

I am aware it is still being used in many places. Nevertheless, the term has been discouraged by exactly this type of initiative, more successfully in some places rather than others.

https://github.com/github/renaming

https://sfconservancy.org/news/2020/jun/23/gitbranchname/

A couple of guys were escorted out of a conference and then fired, for making jokes about 'forking' repo's and big 'dongles' [0]. It's a perfect example of the loud minority ruining lives over what most people I know (including women) will consider a harmless joke.

0: https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/a-dongle-joke-that-spirale...

>we have to make such defensive statements

You don't have to. Just say what you need to and ignore the quetching.

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