I don’t ever get tired of treating people with respect. And Trump was way out of line when he denigrated Carly Fiorina on her looks. What on earth was that about? He frequently acts like a misogynist, and I don’t expect that he will be getting a pass on his unfiltered remarks as we move closer to the primaries.
In some ways, I suppose it would be helpful if people would let their inner Trumps fly, and use all the words like feminazi and f----t and t----y and wetback that they have in their heads, and openly made fun of women’s faces and bodies. At least we’d know what they really thought. But just remember how outraged the people who’d like to use such terms get when anyone dares even to hint at a criticism of things they hold sacred, or dares to suggest that they might conceivably have a racist or otherwise bigoted bone in their bodies. It can work both ways.
Yeah, I don’t like making fun of people’s looks either. But I really don’t like double standards. People on TV, commentators, comedians, etc. routinely make fun of Chris Chrstie’s weight and Donald Trump’s hair. But woe on those who make fun of Hillary’s fat ankles or Carly Fiorina’s face. What’s fair for one is fair for the other.
In the context of its usage at Yale, does anyone really think the word “Master” is racist?
@TatinG, I agree, but the answer is for them to stop making fun of people’s looks, period, not to expand the range of targets.
Re language in the tech world, back when I worked for a systems software company, I was startled to hear the programmers refer to the software/CPU as “he.” Using “she” to refer to boats and so on was common, this was the only time I’d heard the masculine pronoun used in such a way. Why, you might ask? Because “he” was logical. B-)
64 or for the public and media 'outrage' to offensive remarks be of equal intensity.
I refer to things as “he” all the time. I moved my daughter’s sofas and furniture this weekend and said “do you want him over there or over there.” It didn’t mean anything.
@Pizzagirl, believe me, that is why they used it. 
I think it’s he because of 2001 Space Odessy
Very interesting article on Jezebel today about the now almost-forgotten phrase, once incredibly common in Hollywood movies, “free, white, and 21.” A phrase that was always criticized in the African-American press, but didn’t fade away (in movies or in common parlance) until the U.S. government essentially decided that it made the U.S. look bad internationally – a problem in World War II and the Cold War. Before then, those who criticized the phrase as offensive were faced with the same dismissiveness by those who used it that those who love to attack “political correctness” employ today. http://pictorial.jezebel.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-an-all-american-catchphrase-free-1729621311
We’re all sensitive about something; all’s fine and dandy until someone pushes that button. It might be something innocuous to nearly everyone else – and may take many forms – but when we encounter it, things turn sour. It repulses us.
When we’re talking to groups, obviously we’re not going to know what those things are and we might (thus) unwittingly say or describe something that makes someone’s stomach turn. I don’t think we can be faulted, if it is not commonly referred to as offensive per se. I think we can usually be forgiven for accidentally offending someone.
In more intimate communication, of course, it’s far easier to tell if what we say or do offends someone – we see the small shudder, or the facial expression. We then usually apologize and/or seek clarification. Most of us who are not total jerks try to avoid offending people personally.
In terms of offensive language, I think some terms, like the n-word, obviously should never be uttered regardless of circumstance, and the majority of people here in the US would agree with that assessment. That word needs to die.
That level of mass revulsion – it doesn’t matter if you are talking to an audience of 1 or 1000, white or black or brown or yellow or red, or a mixture of all of them – needs to be respected. Such terms should be stricken from use by everyone.
Terms like “Feminazi” I think are mostly used sarcastically. If someone is truly offended – personally affected – by it, I have yet to meet one. It doesn’t mean such people do not exist, of course. But I can’t imagine it being reviled to any degree approaching the aforementioned pejorative term.
“Master” is likely not offensive the vast majority of the time, given the circumstances in which it is usually used. Certainly now and then someone might be offended by it, but en masse? I think most would want to take context into account: if we’re in a wheat field in Georgia, talking about plowing or whatever, that might not be an appropriate place to use that term, regardless of who is present. But at a Yale dorm? In no way would most people consider that term offensive under that circumstance. To make it so, you’d have to bring the “19th century Georgia field” mentality into it, and that has no sensible place at modern-day Yale, right?
If 75% of people expressed offense at its use, obviously those who would otherwise use “master” would not use it in order to avoid offending so many people. But clearly it is not that unpopular, so… I think we should take context into account and, like I said, a master at Yale has probably never been the type of master who would cause the term to be offensive. One would have to make a leap of abstraction to make it offensive, IMO, and/or project a personal fear or aversion – or experience, I suppose – onto it.
It’s been a long time since I’ve heard anyone call a boat or a car or an airplane “she.” Or a country, for that matter – the USA used to be referred to as “she” all the time. And then there are countries that used to be called the motherland or fatherland, as the case was. I assume “Vaterland” is male in German!
In fairness, I’m not sure anybody at Yale is really saying that this use of the term “Master” is racist, or really that it’s offensive in the way a slur is. I think the argument is that black kids in particular feel uncomfortable calling another person “Master.” It is weird–I can remember a black kid in my year who joked about it–hey, that’s my Master over there. But to some it may not seem that funny. I still think that somebody with the smarts and drive to get admitted to Yale should be able to get past this, but I don’t find it to be totally ridiculous.
There’s a much more interesting discussion at Yale, over whether to rename a residential college named after John C. Calhoun. That one has some pretty good arguments on both sides.
“Actually, they are addressed as “Master” all the time. It’s a title, just like Professor, and if you are going to address Master Smith, that’s what you’ll call him or her.”
OK, we don’t do that at Harvard. We call them by their nicknames or “Dr. Smith.”
Or perhaps a disturbingly large percentage of the US population actually agrees with him.
On a recent tour of a ‘plantation’ (and I remember some wanting to wipe that word away), the slaves were referred to as ‘enslaved persons’. So perhaps the counter should be ‘master people’. It’s just getting ridiculous. One could find a plethora of words to find offensive. I recently saw a reference to ‘cis woman’, a term I’d never heard before. (It may have been on CC). I immediately thought of cisplatin a chemotherapy drug so I sort of recoiled from the word. But I’m not going on a crusade (ooops, sorry if you were offended) to remove it from the lexicon. Just never expect me to use that term.
If anyone remembers Lani Guinier and maybe even the controversy surrounding her nomination to be Asst. AG for Civil Rights, I actually read all her articles and the one that’s applicable was about the use of words - I’m paraphrasing because it’s been a while - that label minority persons and how that both categorizes them and takes away some human individuality … except the entire article was full of reference to “whites” and “them” and “they”. I found it amusing: I could understand the urge to talk about the use of language to put people in a box but there is no alternative to labels and she couldn’t resist or avoid using group labels to refer to the “others” in her examples. That’s one nature of language: it’s impossible to individualize unless we develop specific words for each person (and probably for what each person does)! I also found it amusing that she could isolate this form of speech as being somehow essential to the underlying racial/ethnic issues when, to me - and this is my point - if this form of language weren’t identified, then she and others would identify some other signifier of the problem. So with “master”, yeah it’s a word and every language has a bunch of words that identify groups and individuals in ways some might find offensive but really what people are doing is expressing an underlying issue.
And last night I think my point crystalized a bit more: take the swastika. There is, for example, an old building in a suburb of Boston which is ringed with swastikas. Hard to look at, especially if much of your family was murdered by people who took over the symbol and made it one of the ultimate expressions of evil. But it’s also used a symbol in other cultures, has stood as a symbol of peace, and just plain has other meanings - unless of course it’s tilted in a circle on a red flag or accompanied by the SS lightning symbol. Rip the building down? Or recognize that other meanings exist? We’re not talking about something like a word which people use all the time, as in “Masters Degree” or “Master class” or “I mastered that skill” or “master shot”, not a word that some people might sometime feel makes them mentally associate that word with being a slave, but a symbol which conveys the worst possible mass murder. If we rip that building down, if we put away or burn all the old artifacts that use the swastika, then we’re culture destroying barbarians, no better than the Taliban destroying old Buddhas because they offend the deeply iconoclastic Islamic sect.
“That may be true, but “political correctness” is more often used, in my opinion, to attack legitimate complaints by marginalized people about the insulting rhetoric used against them.”
On that I totally agree, and it is one of the reasons that over sensitivity, or claiming terms like master/slave processors are racist, feed into that. PC has been used to cover up for politicians who say horrible things, or racist things, there is no doubt; but when someone makes a mountain over a molehill and finds racism or sexism over trivial things, it feeds the fire of the Limbaughs and Hannity’s and the like, they can cite trivial things as example of the PC police, how stupid they are, but then de facto use that to try and make, for example, someone chiding a Donald Trump for some of his stuff which is vile, as being ‘pc’. When you fight an enemy, ignorance, bias, ugliness, fight the real thing, fighting at shadows or at things done with no ill intent trivializes the real fight.
I found the piece donna posted on the use of master/slave interesting, I think it highlighted my objections even more to people trying to turn the term into some sort of conspiracy to commit racism. In the article, it says that the term seems to first appear, in 1864, when slavery was still legal, which has the implication that the term was therefore based in the slavery of the term. The problem with that is that 1864 represents a time period when the building of mechanical things was exploding, to where there might be a device that has functions that are based in the master/slave concept, so it could also be that before this time, there simply wasn’t the kind of machinery that would use it. And yes, it came into more common usage after WWII, but that doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why, that is when computer technology exploded, the information machine age, where that kind of processing is very very common.
And I’ll also tell you as a gearhead (now retired), that I have looked at shop manuals for cars from Japan, Germany, Italy and England, and they all use the master/slave language for the clutch and brake system, so it isn’t like it was simply created here, and I would bet if you went back to writings from England in the 19th century and Germany describing technology of the time, you would find references to it, too.