RE: Correctness of bus-"master"ing

[KMcLauchlan -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com]

Let me just say this, about that... :-)

On the whole issue of politically-correct language, 
I'm sure there are lots of terms, especially in the 
realm of gender-specific terms for functions that 
have no gender, where it's worthwhile to try for 
terminology that doesn't perpetuate myths.  But there 
are other sorts of terms that don't belong in the 
same slop-bin, and don't deserve to be handled the 
same way, and can't be profitably handled that way 
(except by lawyers and agitators).

A fine example is master/slave.

I'll be one of the last hold-outs, after y'all convert 
to Controller/controllee or to my suggestion, below...  :-)

But, d'you know why? Must be because I'm some racist 
scum who hates "persons of color" (pink ain't a color?), 
jews and other groups, or because I'm just a narsty 
bastidge who enjoys baiting people.  (Whoops!  That 
second one was kinda close to home. People might not 
automatically dismiss that one as hyperbole... hmm.)

Nope.  Try this instead.  I'll know it's time for 
me to adopt Controller/controllee when slavers start 
to refer to themselves and their merchandise that way.
If the PC among us are "successful" in having the 
perfectly valid, useful, accurate and descriptive terms 
"master" and "slave" expunged from the language, they'll 
succeed only in displacing the concepts to other terms.
When the new terms for exactly the old meanings become 
common, nothing will have been accomplished except a 
bit of circularly-disposed, mutual back-patting.

Slave is only a word. It is not a word that was made 
up for the purpose of slurring other beings. It is a 
word that describes a concept and a condition, and 
it's an english word.  There are (obviously) different 
words, in other languages, that have the same meaning[s] 
and that likely have even longer histories to them.

We're already a bunch of avid little participants in 
the general dumbing-down of speakers and readers (fewer 
of *them* around every day) of English.  When we succeed 
in eliminating yet another notion from general converse, 
we won't have protected anybody from it.  We'll just 
have made it harder -- for a while -- to communicate 
about it.  Eventually, the new words will necessarily 
take on all the connotations and denotations of the old, 
and the world will have gained only a few more tons of 
PC smugness.

Were I a betting man, I'd bet that the few remaining 
people who have been slaves would be the last ones to 
want it hushed up and sanitized.  Ask any holocaust 
denier who it is that most implacably works against 
their brand of spin-doctoring.

I agree with someone over on CEL who suggested that 
words like "actress" probably deserve to disappear, 
if for no other reason than that your average male 
would take umbrage at being called one, while there's 
no such stigma for female "actors".

But, if you really, really must do away with the terms 
"master" and "slave", may I humbly suggest you go 
with "dom" and "sub"?       <g>

By the way, you're hearing this from a guy who once 
gave in to a pack of # -at- %&* and removed all occurences 
of the word "rear" from a hardware manual, and replaced 
them with "back", because somebody was titillated by 
"rear" and could undestand it only as "rump".

Sigh.


/k