Upshot: "master" and "slave" terminology

[Karen Mulholland <kemulholland -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Thanks to all of you for an entertaining and
thought-provoking discussion! You've helped me to
arrive at a solution that seems satisfactory to
everyone involved:

1. "Master" and "slave" are the right words to
describe the relationship between the two pieces of
equipment in question. The technical usage is
well-established. 

2. Because they describe the relationship, we've
decided we'll always use these words as adjectives.
We'll talk about the "master unit" and the "slave
unit". This seems to eliminate the emotional response
to the words.

3. There's plenty of precedent for saying that we
*slave* one unit to the other. We've never seen that
usage applied to anything except hardware, so we don't
find it problematic - except perhaps as jargon. But
our audience is engineers; so we see no problem with
speaking their own language to them.

Having cussed and discussed this matter half to death,
my colleague and I are now prepared to defend our
decision even if we DO encounter the Political
Correctness Police. 

KM
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