Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Its politcal corerctness gone mad, I tell you.

“The computing world’s venerable master/slave naming convention has come under fire by Los Angeles county officials who charge that this type of product description is offensive.”

I presume the offense here is in the use of the word ‘slave’, referring to a device (not person) that is entirely controlled by the ‘master’ device. Surely this is correct usage?

Or are we not even allowed to mention the word ‘slave’ any more? Doesn’t that deny history? We cannot divorce ourselves from our history. We should be happy that we have moved on from that time. More, we should be looking around for the things we’re doing now that our children will see as we see the slavetrade.


Categories: Memories.

/ 9 Comments

9 comments

  1. fuzzygoth

    you have to be joking, I actually made a post
    earlier about how political corectness is diffrent
    from diplomacy and and manners. Political correctness
    is a rabid beast in its own way, where are all
    it really takes to prevent offence is diplomacy
    and respect. I hope tese people get laughed out
    of sodding court.

    History should not be denyed after all is it not
    written somewhere “those who fail to learn from
    history are doomed to repeat it” or something
    similar.

    *sigh people are f*king weird, take off nuke the
    site from orbit*

    Reply
  2. mr_flay

    When I was in New Orleans last year, I went to visit an old plantation house. Slaves were mentioned maybe three times, once in reluctant response to a persistent questioner (“How many people worked here?” “Oh, about 40 in the summer, about 25 in the winter.” “Including slaves?” “Oh, erm….” etc.) and never willingly. Being an escape artist, I was keen to find any manacles, shackles, bilboes, coffles or handcuffs I could lay my hands to. I was regarded with contempt in every antique shop I wandered into, including ones that proudly displayed Civil War militaria from both sides.

    Americans are ashamed of slavery, which is good. However, they are trying to pretend it never happened, which is bad.

    Reply
    • neilh

      Pretending it never happened says “I don’t want to learn anything from that”, sure, we, in the UK, see things a bit differently, since it happened ‘over there’. I guess the closest parallel we have is our colonisation of places like India, which was oppressive but not in the same way. There is no way I’d consider denying that part of our history, even though its not something I’m proud of.

      Beyond that, a fascination with the implements of slavery (as you’re quest for handcuffs was probably seen) doesn’t imply a belief on its correctness – I thoroughly disagree with Nazi politics, but I love their art. If the two are not seperable we lose more and more of our history over time as more and more things get association with bad times.

      Reply
  3. marvelousmrchip

    Neil,

    This is the bit of the article I like best, but there’s no link to any more info on it: “In related news, Intel has called for server chief Mike Fister to change his name”.

    As for moving on from the age of slavery, many of us have, but there’s still an awful lot of it about… especially in 3rd world countries. But hopefully not in LA!

    Reply
    • neilh

      Its called outsourcing now…

      Sure, slavery is a bad thing, my point was more that in the context of devices controlling each other there is no bad connotations, no reason why this nomenclature shouldn’t be used, it describes the relationship perfectly. If we cannot use the word slave in this context we should remove it from our dictionaries, it cannot be used at all.

      Reply
  4. neilh

    Indeed, language has a low enough bandwidth anyway that removing perfectly good words from valid usage in the name of ‘correctness’ seems unnecessary.

    Reply
  6. neilh

    Re: ooo that took a little comprehension!

    Yeah, they both bug the hell out of me. But then, I guess spelling an 18 letter word on a regular basis probably would too.

    Reply

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