this is bound to generate good faith arguments and rational discussion.

How is ‘native’ pejorative, or otherwise insensitive? Really

“Hung” isnt even violent. “Hanged” is violent.

Both are the past-tense of “hang” but “hanged” is exclusively used for the method of executing a person, while “hung” is for all other usages. And also to mean having a big pp.

… all while taking on Coca-Cola and Accenture as partners, you couldn’t make it up.

Linguistic witch hunts are not merely distasteful and often misguided; they sometimes have unintended consequences ranging from corruption of historical records to character assassination.

I am embarrassed to see them taking place in my field.

I don’t really care, but if someone wants to do a find replace I won’t stop them. I agree we should stop using terms to demean people (slurs), but my opinion is that terms that have a meaning that is contextually disconnected from the one considered harmful, can have alternatives but don’t have to change.

We are generally okay with a murder to describe a group of crows, despite it having a more violent definition in its typical usage. (Vancouverites love crows, btw)

Nope.

I can understand where they’re coming from, but the examples given seem particularly… minor?

Not sure if it’s my privilege showing, or the article author chose examples to make this seem goofy.

During a work presentation, an exec used the phrase “opening the kimono” in reference to showing business accounting books to potential investors. I had never heard it before, but my gut reaction was that it was some kind of prostitution/nudity reference, and kinda gross for a professional setting.

Maybe my mind is in the gutter, because allegedly it refers to a Japanese businessman coming home from work and wearing his kimono loosely to relax. Not really sure how that relates to transparent accounting practices.

Anyway, some words or phrases can be interpreted wrongly by others who have never heard them before. It’s not a reason to always ban them, but it does make sense to evaluate our language with outsider perspective in mind.

as well as replacing “pow-wow” with “huddle” or “meeting”

What if you are indigenous American? Can you still say it then? Or are all cultural references banned from language?

I guess I never thought about “hung” but that makes sense. I default to “frozen” anyway. Sanity check and pow-wow for sure would be better to replace.

Isn’t “dummy” originally talking about, well, a dummy? Like a crash test dummy? And then the negative connotation is applying that to a person? It seems like dummy is used properly in the context here?

“Native” seems a bit far reaching. Native doesn’t have an intrinsic negative connotation, but I guess it is used to be negative or exclusionary.

Childish people trying to hard to sanitize language.

If you create a foundation whose entire purpose is to find problems with language, that’s exactly what they’re going to do.

My time investment in learning Esperanto is looking preeetty clever, now. Maybe I’ll just switch to writing all documentation in þat.