<story><title>Word usage guidance and alternative terms</title><url>https://developers.google.com/style/word-list</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tsujp</author><text>&amp;quot;The term man (from Proto-Germanic *mann- &amp;quot;person&amp;quot;) and words derived from it can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their sex or age.&amp;quot; [1]&lt;p&gt;As with most things Google does this will set some kind of precedent that a non-trivial subset may follow on with. Where does this stop though? Human -&amp;gt; Huperson? What do we rename the `kill` command to? How will that affect scripts that use it? The result of that is to then have a shim to `kill` anyway so the net result is a tonne of stuff breaks and `kill` is still present?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m all for improving our use of language but a lot of these kinds of changes are virtue signals that don&amp;#x27;t enact any meaningful change at all [2][3]. There are lots of words taken out of context purposefully for instance, &amp;quot;my process is hung&amp;quot; has nothing to do with hanging of human beings.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Man_(word)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Man_(word)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mooseyanon.medium.com&amp;#x2F;github-f-ck-your-name-change-de599033bbbe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mooseyanon.medium.com&amp;#x2F;github-f-ck-your-name-change-d...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=26487854&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=26487854&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hutzlibu</author><text>I very much agree, that this is not really helping nor worth the effort in most cases. Like whats offensive with about a hanging process?&lt;p&gt;I can understand trying to remove some stigmatisations, like blacklist for bad and whitelist for good, even though they are hard as they are very commonly used. But maybe that is part of the problem, that our western culture has the colour encoding of white == good and black == bad.&lt;p&gt;Even in an ideal world, where people don&amp;#x27;t notice the skin color anymore, I can see how a person with a black skin might feel hurt about that encoding in general, so maybe it is good moving step by step away from that, despite that it causes inconvenience.</text></comment>
<story><title>Word usage guidance and alternative terms</title><url>https://developers.google.com/style/word-list</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tsujp</author><text>&amp;quot;The term man (from Proto-Germanic *mann- &amp;quot;person&amp;quot;) and words derived from it can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their sex or age.&amp;quot; [1]&lt;p&gt;As with most things Google does this will set some kind of precedent that a non-trivial subset may follow on with. Where does this stop though? Human -&amp;gt; Huperson? What do we rename the `kill` command to? How will that affect scripts that use it? The result of that is to then have a shim to `kill` anyway so the net result is a tonne of stuff breaks and `kill` is still present?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m all for improving our use of language but a lot of these kinds of changes are virtue signals that don&amp;#x27;t enact any meaningful change at all [2][3]. There are lots of words taken out of context purposefully for instance, &amp;quot;my process is hung&amp;quot; has nothing to do with hanging of human beings.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Man_(word)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Man_(word)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mooseyanon.medium.com&amp;#x2F;github-f-ck-your-name-change-de599033bbbe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mooseyanon.medium.com&amp;#x2F;github-f-ck-your-name-change-d...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=26487854&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=26487854&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>beeforpork</author><text>&amp;gt; Human -&amp;gt; Huperson&lt;p&gt;Haha, that&amp;#x27;s good one, I love it! :-)&lt;p&gt;(Although &amp;#x27;human&amp;#x27; comes from Latin and has nothing to do with Germanic &amp;#x27;man&amp;#x27;, but these details are never part of such a discussion, so let&amp;#x27;s ignore them.)&lt;p&gt;When do people realise that &amp;#x27;homo sapiens&amp;#x27; is sexist (and maybe offensive to LGBT* people!!)?  It must be renamed to &amp;#x27;persona sapiens&amp;#x27;!</text></comment>