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> More of the original message:
>> Insects enslave each other.
> My response:
> Yeah, and they have exoskeletons and lack a central nervous system.
> Let's not get sociobiological here, and start comparing human
> behaviour to that of insects.
The point is that the condition transcends the food chain. It is pervasive
in biology and history and is at worst a description of a condition or
concept, not a slur. I resent the subjugation of our language to the whims
of a few politically active groups who'd have us believe that the word "gay"
no longer means "happy," that the word "slave" can only have negative
sociological implications, and that "white middle class males" are a group
to be dismissed because we're so homogenous as to be irrelevant to this
discussion. What crap!
Some people consider carnivorous diets offensive. Shall we ban Wendy's ads
from TV? Some people think we value animals too highly in relation to other
human beings. Shall we do the same with Purina ads? Master and slave are
words with a meaning that is defined by (changes with) the context. Is
QMaster, as a name, offensive to anyone?
> More of the original:
>>The perfunctory description of the relationship between hard
>>drives that this terminology captures is the point, not the
>>PC crap that people who have too much time on their hands
>>attribute to it.
>
> My response:
> The point is context, and clarity.
As was mine. You read what I wrote, but did you pay attention?
> Slavery in the human context can
> 'mean' a number of different things, given the tendency to
> lump certain 'practices' into one category.
It's not lumping. Regardless of whether humans are involved, slavery is a
condition that some insects are subjected to by other insects. And some
ethnic groups have historically subjected other ethnic (or socio-economic)
groups to it, too. It is a desciption of a state, condition or practice, not
a racially-exclusive term. The C:\ drive is master to the D:\ drive, which
is a slave. The way the two work together, master and slave is an apt
description. As I said before, the drives have dominant and submissive
tendencies, and (tongue still in cheek), that's why it's such an appropriate
way to describe their relationship. <G>
> End of lecture.
But I didn't LEARN anything! To paraphrase Oliver Twist: "Please sir, more."
****************************************
Dan Emory <danemory -at- primenet -dot- com> wrote:
> PC is the next-to-last way-station on the road to LCD.
> LCD (lowest common denominator), as applied to editing
> of the written word, is a deadly smoothing process that
> eliminates the spikes where meaning is conveyed.
