Yeah, this stuff hits different now. Bothered me in IT to use the S/M terminology professionally. Opted to use client and host whenever possible and others had a hard time understanding why.
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
66 points (97.1% liked)
Not The Onion
18931 readers
467 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Seeing the same with whitelist/blacklist changing to allowlist/denylist. I personally would vote greenlist and redlist, but I have no power here.
Also have heard mention of the problem of male/female connectors nomenclature.
People really need to get it though their fucking heads that English sucks and just cause both sex and gender use the same word doesn't mean they mean the same thing.
Homonyms suck. But the male sex and male gender are two different things. Sex is and always will be a three options thing. Male, female or both.
Gender is not sex, sex is not gender.
But I always heard people say the word homonyms is bigoted and I just can't at this point.
We built our language around humans and land mammals. We arnt mushrooms with 3000+ sexs. It sucks but we unless we can get people to start inventing new words somethings just have to be delt with.
The slave master and white and black lists have valid understandable other options and we should use them.
But short literally any other option for plugs is just going to be confusing or create arbitrary nonsense. Plug A and B would work but there's no fucking world that doesn't just end up with every other company or industry labeling things wrong or backwards compared to their competitors.
And when your working with electricity YOU DO NOT WANT CONFUSION.
Some things bothered me, and seemed worth the removal, like "slave". MySQL 8.0 deprecated it, and 8.4 removes it entirely.
But, the whole white/blacklist thing seemed like we're making color associations that don't really exist.
I use allowlist and blocklist instead because it's clearer. Or rejectlist or banlist or acceptlist or whatever verb more accurately conveys what the list is doing. White/Black are frequently not clear enough.
It's not racism. It's just that sysadmins are goths who prefer dark mode, and were esthetically aggravated by the discordant terminology.
Also have heard mention of the problem of male/female connectors nomenclature.
Do you know what the forerunners for replacement are?
If it were up to me, I'd go with weed/lungs. Thank god it's not up to me
I mean honestly if it were my call, I'd refer to the connectors as penile or vaginal, just to clarify anything that might've been misconstrued with male/female connectors. Malicious compliance.
pitcher/catcher gets used a lot but also makes me giggle because I’m immature
Iv legit heard someone call that terminology bigoted. You literally CANT win with plugs. Iv tried. Iv tried hard.
Well they’re dumbasses then, because it’s using baseball as the metaphor.
One side pitches the ball to the other. Ball goes in glove.
It’s silly because pitching and catching are older terms for top and bottom.
Introduced in 2023? A lot more recent than I would've thought.
Yeah I don't see this as an issue
Usiy the word to convey a certain meaning or intent doesn't mean you condone it, it doesn't mean I have Hitler posters on the wall.
Same as master/slave; I don't have a dungeon filled with human beings that have to do everything I say. I do have a database setup with a master and multiple slaves. I don't condone slavery btw, one would think that is obvious
Want more? How about male/female plugs? Need to van those words too now because somehow that is sexist? Am I excluding transgender people for not having a trans plug? Should we rename those to.... I do t even know! We call them that because it makes sense, one goes inside the other, and maybe, juuuuust maybe we shouldn't read too much into it?
How about killing all my children! Oh shit, I am an insane mass murderer now! Worse? How about forking a child process? Ooooh shiiiiit, now I am a pedophile! Except that, yeah, no, all that too are just words we use to easily explain relationships between processes on computers, and how we duplicate processes or end them, and we use those words because they make intuitive sense. But, I guess that too soon willl be an issue.
I can't wait for the kill command to be renamed to "snuggle" or something.
Words suggest “this works“! Take it to society. Like darwinism.
Most astonishing for me, that it's still called Master bedroom and bathroom, which has that direct origin. The software example on the other hand are just fitting words for the interaction of electronic devices or software pieces...
Most astonishing for me, that it’s still called Master bedroom and bathroom, which has that direct origin.
The word master does not originate from slavery. If you study the etymology, you'll also find that it significantly predates slave, and has more than a few meanings that are not even remotely related to slavery.
IIRC master was the normal ass English word for your superior in any type of subservient role (employees, servants, indentured, school children, etc...). In the "Master Bedroom" instance, master makes sense as the title of a household patriarch.
As soon as they started forcing non-whites into new world chattel slavery, all tiers of white classes suddenly thought it was degrading to use the same word they forced on the lesser races. This is where English started adapting new words for the old usage of master, such as boss from the Dutch baas.
If anything, refusing to use master in any context is far more racist than normal usage. You're perpetuating the idea that a word's use by slaves automatically (and retroactively) sullies it for all time.