I’m not interested in an argument over what some people dismiss as “political correctness” — which is what this is, but to my mind that’s a synonym for “considerate behavior” — and if you think the words you use don’t matter, please feel free to mute this topic. But let’s talk about possible alternatives to offensive terminology.
Yesterday was Juneteenth, the annual observance of the day in 1865 some of the last enslaved Americans were told they’d been freed. So it was a little disconcerting that I encountered that day, in the context of synth DIY, two different instances of use of the terms “master/slave”, or “master” on its own but with “slave” implied.
For those not in the US, or those in the US who’ve insulated themselves from the affected communities, it might not be readily apparent how problematic this usage is. But descendants of slaves — and there are people alive today whose grandparents were slaves — understand how hurtful this language is. Of the two words, “slave” is the worse since it’s unambiguous. “Master” has multiple connotations:
But these I think (aside from master bedroom) all derive from “master” in the sense of mastery of a skill or discipline. In contexts where “master” is used to connote controlling power, whether or not “slave” is explicitly used to refer to the target of that power, I argue it’s inappropriate.
I’ve been doing this in IT for years now. It was brought to my attention by a co-worker and I was like: “oh yeah, that’s fucked up.”
In general, parent/child is good for hierarchy (like a cluster manager and those within the cluster), and client/server is good for a relationship where things are fetched when called for by another thing (like a webserver and a browser).
For a waveform that is being synced or modulated, there is already terminology for this. There carrier and the modulating signal. You see this with frequency modulation or amplitude modulation.
The software world has alternate terminology but for hardware it seems difficult. Think I2C bus terminology. And don’t even look for synonyms of slave, they are all bad. I came up with these and some others that were just awful.
control / peripheral (a peripheral can be a controller so that gets muddy)
Source / Sink (it describes the direction pretty well but maybe not the intent)
server / client (see above, but server now has an established meaning)
producer / consumer (yes, but awkward)
superior / subordinate or sup / sub (Domme is so much better though!)
#2 / #6 (for Prisoner fans)
I’m glad we’ve mostly replaced gendered (ed. sexed) connector terminology. Only plants and animals should be sexed.
Have we? What are genders replaced by?
Most (all?) mating pairs of connectors I know of, have a male and a female part.
Electronic catalogs and web sites are still filled with male and female parts.
I dont think that just because we have been using specific terminology for a long time that it is impossible to change. We do it all the time with words. “Hip”, “Rad”, and “Gay” either have fallen to disuse, or have taken different meanings.
I think it’s as simple as swapping instances of “slave” with “worker”. You’d probably not even need to change the master part. This would work even with i2c multi-master bus configurations.
Me neither, but I think here the differentiation is between “gender” and “sex.” (Gender being he spectrum of cultural identities related to your tackle box and how you fish with it, and sex being mostly chromosomal.) But if you want to start a campaign to get manufacturers to change their plug and socket definitions to something like “dong/snootch” then I’ll totally get behind you, @feralbeagle!
Responding to this and similar discussions and as far back as I could change them, some posts are apparently too old for me to edit, I’ve changed all in the ‘Music share thread - Share your work’ referring to using two sequencers in a M-S relation into “Ableton Live synced to Logic Audio”. I did the same to all descriptions I added to the videos on youtube.
This was my suggestion, about something I found on the internet. Trying to see it from your perspective, I see now why this may not be a good alternative. When I found this, I immediately thought of the game overlord, and later about the movie franchise despicable me. In that movie the little creatures are literally called “minions”. Where you from, what is thought about this?
Yeah, I saw the minion suggestion in an article as being called humorous and it’s kind of funny at first (because of the movies) but loses it’s charm after I thought about it for a while. Senior/junior is problematic because it implies senior is the master and junior is the slave. Experience shows that senior can just as easily imply stale and outdated and junior as up to date and relevant.
Plug/socket, pin/receptacle is common and works fine to change from male/female. Sexed is the better term, thank you @Maxhirez. It seems weird to call connectors male/female. Are they going to reproduce? Do they need a nest or something? It probably feels less weird to native speakers of Romance languages, maybe?
[rant] Naming in general is something I try to pay attention to because I have worked on a lot of projects with confusing or bad names. A project name should be a container for all the information relating to that project. It doesn’t even have to have any meaning. The last one was project “Now”. I mean, how long is that name going to be relevant? [/rant]
Unfortunately in my country ( The Netherlands ) managers and people in IT (and there are more) use quite a lot of English words when they describe what the are working on or what we all should be working towards. Oftentimes the terminology is not clear to anyone whatsoever. Think about ‘Big Data’ and ‘Data Science’ etc. This leads to lots of ambiguities and problems. It is sad that they do not even try to use their own mother tongue, which obviously they should be able to express themselves in more clearly than any language which they are not native speakers of.
I know that’s how sex is expressed in a lot of the case but expression of the XX and XY chromosomes is only part of it. It can change with environment in the prenatal period and it can change by surgery.
*kind of. In humans, surgery can reassign genital appearance and limited functionality as well as secondary characteristics, but it doesn’t change the kinds of gametes that the surgery/hormone recipient produces from sperm to egg or vice-versa. No amount of testosterone or progestin injections has yet been shown to change that (though that has been done in the lab, which was considered ethically problematic at the time.) I guess the way I see it the distinction is scientifically useful in describing reproductive function.
Chromosomes aren’t even a great marker for sex or gender. Beyond XX/XY, there’s XO, XXY/XXXY, XYY, and of course (the problematically-named-in- its-own-right) XXX. Some of these variants are associated with reproductive difficulties, some aren’t.
There are apparently some animals that actually can change sex after sexual maturity if there aren’t any members of the opposite sex available. Wouldn’t that be convenient?
When eggs start to become infertile and the menopause begins in the women assigned to their gender at birth who identify as female are still women though no reproduction is possible. The current state of the art medical procedures will make a gender expression match the sexual expression mostly with exception to those who feel left out of childbirth.
I agreed here but wanted to clarify I left out the other chromosomes unfortunately because I felt it would overcast the point but yes those are also tied to sex.
To complicate matter more, 1.7% of the population is believed to have at least one intersex condition. It is almost as if we are creatures that don’t fit perfectly in little perfect boxes.
Getting back to the topic of problematic terminology, I try to remove gender from my vocabulary. Its less inclusive to say “guys”, “dudes”, “man”, etc when it is just as easy for me to just not say that and it be less “boys club” style.
This i think is kinda important in a community like synths, which has a long history of the ladies being involved.