It took me a fairly long time to really “get” this, and I think a lot of people still aren’t there yet:
The goal of focusing on inclusive language isn’t about censorship and prohibitions and your free speech rights. It’s about paying attention to the meanings attached to words, and how sometimes words carry baggage you might not intend. I forget the context, but someone recently summarized this as: “If I’m going to offend someone, I want to make sure it’s intentional.”
Master/Slave architectures
For example, in tech, a lot of things are referred to as a master/slave architecture, where one component (the master) controls the others (slaves). Perhaps the phrasing has offended some people, but it’s really not about that. It’s about: when you’re describing your technology to people, do you want them to be thinking about slavery? For those who use the term every day in the technical sphere, we use the words as technical terms divorced from the historical context of slavery, but can you see why marketing might not want to tell customers, “Sorry for the downtime. We’re having a problem with the slaves”?
In many cases, the terminology that has emerged to replace master/slave has ultimately been better. A common database pattern is to direct all of your writes to a “master” database server, and “slave” copies of the database would receive those updates but would be read-only. You can direct number-crunching analytics to the slaves without bogging down the master database. In some cases, it also provides backup; if the master goes down, a slave can be promoted to master.
“Master” and “slave” really just aren’t accurate words for that. Calling them “read replicas” more accurate reflects their role; the process of keeping the “slaves” updated was always called “replication” anyway.
Master bedrooms
I read an interesting article a while back about how in certain markets, there was a move away from the term “master bedroom” in real estate listings. The article explored the etymology of the term, and a “master” bedroom has nothing to do with slavery. It refers to the room for the “master of the house,” the male head of a household. It has no racist or slavery-related origins.
But the article wasn’t about how the “woke mind virus” was ruining real estate listings, because that’s not what’s happening. People interviewed in the article generally agreed that the term didn’t have problematic origins. Rather, the term simply made some people think of slavery, and some realtors found it was easier to sell houses if customers didn’t have slavery on the mind. There’s been no mandate; the term hasn’t been “canceled.” You can still say “master bedroom.” Some people simply found it was easier not to.
Blacklists
To be honest, I have no idea about the etymology of whitelists and blacklists. Made it was a racist thing from centuries ago, or maybe it has completely innocent origins.
But it occurred to me one day that the more inclusive “allowlist” and “blocklist” are also just better names. As a native English speaker, I get that “whitelist” is good because white is associated with good and “blacklist” is bad because black is associated with bad. But, even beyond the “yikes” in that association, if you don’t already know the term, perhaps because you’re a native speaker of another language, a “block list” makes very intuitive what it is, as does an “allow list.”
You guys
I had a lengthy talk about the term “guys” some time ago, and this is really what led to me noticing the divide between those who think this is about censorship and those who think this is about being more thoughtful about what meaning our words carry.
I have never met anyone who doesn’t understand that a phrase like “What do you guys think?” is being used in a gender-agnostic way. Not a soul has ever told me they thought I was only addressing men. (And, although this isn’t a representative sampling, since I became conscious about using the phrase, I’ve noticed that it’s not just, well, guys who use the phrase that way. A number of women do it as well.[fn]Non-binary folx, unsurprisingly, are more careful about using gendered language.[/fn])
I’ve been trying to remove “you guys” from my vocabulary for two reasons. One is that I’ve realized that it gives me an excuse to incorporate “y’all” into my workplace vocabulary, which really is reason enough. But the other is really that, working as a software engineer, “you guys” is technically correct way too often. All too often, all of the engineers are male. Me saying “y’all” instead of “you guys” isn’t going to change that, but if it makes just the tiniest difference in challenging the assumption that the person answering “What do you guys think?” will be a guy, it’s worthwhile.
Uppity folks
This is maybe the example I should have led with.
According to my dictionary, the word uppity emerged as “a fanciful formation from up.” In the dictionary, the word carries no baggage, and simply refers to someone arrogant or self-important.
Not hanging around racists, I didn’t know this until recently1Realistically, this is more just ignorance on my part than evidence that I’m free from any bias., but it turns out that the word has a long history of being used to refer to people of color, and obviously not in a good way.
And it’s these unwritten connotations that are behind trying to deprecate a lot of these words and phrases. I’m not being told that I am banned from saying “uppity” because racists used to use it. People are politely flagging that, if I refer to someone as “uppity,” unintended meaning may attach to those words and cause what I’m saying to have racist attachments that I didn’t want.