
Twitter Engineering:We’re starting with a set of words we want to move away from - wozer
https://mobile.twitter.com/twittereng/status/1278733305190342656
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ThrowawayR2
Already discussed a day ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723433](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723433)

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r721
Also here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23726882](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23726882)

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PragmaticPulp
I worked at a company that did this almost a decade ago. The idea seemed
simple enough, but the unintended consequences started adding up over the next
few years.

The biggest problem was that the company became the arbiter of what was
offensive and what was not. We felt like we came up with a comprehensive list
when we started, but a few people became very good at finding new words that
might possibly be offensive to someone, somewhere, in some context. Eventually
the company has to draw the line and decline to remove potentially-offensive
words, at which point the company is effectively declaring that topic not
offensive _enough_ to take action. This doesn’t go over well, and some people
are very eager to make a big deal about it on social media.

The second problem is that declaring certain words to be possibly offensive is
easily misinterpreted as declaring those words as _always_ offensive. We had
problems with people assuming ill intent when interview candidates and new
hires accidentally used words on the banned list with no ill intentions.
Marking the words themselves offensive instead of the person’s intentions
creates a lot of traps for people who don’t know about or haven’t yet fully
memorized the bad words list. This created a lot of divisions and cliques
within the company where people were hesitant to interface with certain other
groups for fear of being mistakenly marked as offensive. When the safest
option is to keep to yourself or a small group of peers who you know won’t
misinterpret your words, cooperation and coordination decreases.

The third problem was the long tail complexity of eliminating these words from
the business. Doing a search and replace on the codebase and documentation is
easy enough. But you’re still left with third party open source projects and
services that contain the bad words. Once you reach the point of people
suggesting to fork open-source services just to rename parts of the source
code, the complexity and cost grows exponentially. At the worst point, we had
a team trying to justify creation of an Ubuntu fork that used the phrase
“manual pages” everywhere instead of the possibly-sexist “man pages”. The
amount of engineering time, energy, and dollars spent debating these topics
and implementing solutions spiraled into far more complexity than any of us
imagined at the start.

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trvrprkr
> The biggest problem was that the company became the arbiter of what was
> offensive and what was not.

Companies already have to do this and they have done this for a long time.
There are undoubtedly offensive words, phrases, and actions which a company
actively discourages or will not tolerate.

The problem is that society progresses in disjointed ways, and common
vernacular often lags far behind that as well. Instead of waiting for the
overwhelming majority of people to understand that some words which once were
perceived as neutral actually carry a darker, less-desirable connotation,
Twitter (and others) are working to get ahead of that.

Sure, the lines may be blurry now, but that's no reason to claim that
companies weren't arbiters of offensive words or actions in the past.

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loopz
Modern authority have moderated speech. Trying to ban words is insulting,
reprehensible and incompetent. At some online forums it may need to be done,
but that is lack of better alternatives, like better moderation systems.

Moderate behaviour and speech, not words and people.

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imgabe
I just have a hard time believing that anybody hears the word "Grandfathered"
in an engineering context and thinks: "But wait a minute, I would be a
Grandmother, not a Grandfather. They must be using that word to subtly
indicate that they do not want me here, despite having gone through an
exhaustive recruiting and interview process to select me and then paying me
quite a lot of money".

This seems like an enormous waste of time.

Edit: I was corrected below about why Grandfather is considered objectionable.
I think the general point still stands. Nobody is using these terms with the
intent of excluding anyone. Interpreting them that way takes a deliberate
effort that would probably be better spent elsewhere.

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moultano
That isn't why they're removing grandfathered. The word "grandfathered" exists
because of laws in the south that kept black people from voting by saying that
you were only allowed to vote if your grandfather could vote.

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centimeter
Raising this much hell over a long-forgotten etymology is childish.

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empath75
It’s not long forgotten. The consequences of those laws are very much alive
today. It might be forgotten by you, but it is surely known by a lot of people
in the south.

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creato
His point was obviously not that the consequences were forgotten but the
original meaning of the phrase was forgotten, and I'm pretty sure you know it.
What are you trying to accomplish with this? How did you get from "I never
knew what grandfathered originally meant" to "maybe you forgot about jim crow,
but I haven't".

I feel like racists are far more empowered by things like this than simply
allowing the etymology of the word to be forgotten, like it basically had
been. And now, it's just another line in the sand for people to argue about on
social media. I think if I were a racist activist, I'd be finding things like
this to start arguing about under a false flag.

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empath75
Forgotten by who?

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mmmpetrichor
I would ask the same question. Is there evidence that somehow the majority has
forgotten the original meaning but the minority hasn't? Do you have any
evidence of that? I'm sure if you study this type of thing as a hobby you
could probably score a lot of points in arguments. But is that the best way to
go about making real changes?

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empath75
So multiple people have claimed that “no one“ knows what it means and the
original meaning was forgotten and multiple people in this thread knew the
original meaning and the the origin is listed in the dictionary etymology and
Wikipedia page.

It’s not a deep dark secret. I grew up in the south, I know the history and
the racial connotation for it was always there for me. That it’s not there for
you or that you never thought about it before doesn’t mean that nobody did or
that everyone here is making it up.

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mmmpetrichor
Social media blurs the lines and it makes it hard for anyone to understand
reality versus fiction. It was probably the same when mass communication took
off in the first place, but it's happening again. Any particular change in
language like this seems like a small thing, but it's very hard for me to tell
if those changes are actually being driven by an oppressed community who
thinks such changes are important, or if they're coming from meaningless
social media echo chambers. Latino versus Latinx is another example I struggle
with. Should we modify an entire language due to some perceived sexism? Who is
actually perceiving this sexism and is it the real voice of the community?

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Barrin92
I actually like the more neutral terms from a technical perspective because
they seem more self-evident but if people think this solves any sort of racism
I'm not sure what to think

Jack Dorsey spent his last holiday on a private meditation retreat in Myanmar,
while the people in the streets were organising anti-muslim mobs on social
media. Maybe they ought to work on that if they're looking for racism on their
platform

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XorNot
Slavery is with us today in too many parts of the world. American chattel
slavery was ~3 human lifetimes ago (for long enough lived humans).

I am completely okay with removing words which imply domination and
subjugation without moral judgement from day to day vocabularly.

Slavery is a horrific, barbaric practice, and if the word only ever comes up
in one context with all the moral and emotional weight that should carry, then
that's an improvement.

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bitL
Are Slavic nations going to be renamed?

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XorNot
Maybe go lookup the entymology of "slavic" and then consider how stupid your
hot take makes you look.

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bitL
It's not about their etymology, it's about the origin of the word "slave" in
English language that stems from Slav:

[https://www.etymonline.com/word/slave](https://www.etymonline.com/word/slave)

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XorNot
And so if you think carefully about the fact it's a term used to refer to a
group of people who might be the only ones who's opinion on whether they're
okay with it matters, but also how it's not a commonly used programming
term...

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bitL
I mean it must be pretty awful for Slavic people to realize that "slave" comes
from their name in English/Latin and they are by default viewed in a biased
way. Similarly how Slovenes and the word "slovenly" go along.

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mellosouls
_Twitter_

to talk quickly and nervously in a high voice, saying very little of
importance or interest

[https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/twitter](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/twitter)

 _Twit_

a stupid person

[https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/twit](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/twit)

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rvz
Yet here we have a Twitter engineer who worked on this and their username is
very hard for anyone to cite without 'offending' another person. [0] Let me be
the first and see what happens.

1 step forward, 512 steps back.

[0]
[https://mobile.twitter.com/negroprogrammer/status/1278728952...](https://mobile.twitter.com/negroprogrammer/status/1278728952522043393)

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untog
Huh?

A black person appropriating a term of abuse for themselves is very different
than a white person using it against them. Their username is not offensive.

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lostapathy
I also can’t say his name at a team meeting to cite where I learned something
he may have tweeted. You can’t really make a word unusably offensive by
others, but then keep using it yourself. At least not if you still want your
voice to be part of the broader discussion.

~~~
loopz
Having different double standards who get to use the term is not only
hypocritical, it's also racist.

Therefore everyone must be allowed to use his nick: negroprogrammer, or risk
the above violation.

I think it smart if for free speech, and not just used as a sword or shield
against others.

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taylodl
We also no longer use the word _niggardly_ \- even though its etymology is
completely different from the other n-word that sounds similar. We somehow
survived that.

Likewise we no longer use the word _retard_ as in I need to retard this
engine's timing so it runs richer.

Yet both of these are words I grew up with and guess what? We're still here
and our engines are running just fine, thank you. I'm old enough to have heard
with my own ears that language evolves. The set of words used today are a
different set of words than were used when I was growing up and the set of
words that were being used when I was growing up was a different set than were
used when my grandparents were growing up. You'd think a bunch of technology
people wanting to "change the world" would understand this better.

Anyway, to my ears griping about language changing is like griping about loud
music: you're just getting old. As my father always said _getting old stinks
but it sure beats the alternative_. Now get off my lawn!

P.S. - when I was growing up you heard the word _stinks_ a lot for where you'd
now use the word _sucks_. But _sucks_ used in such a pejorative manner was
considered a 4-letter word due to its reference to fellatio. Like I said,
language changes and evolves.

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peterlk
Can someone explain to me the "dummy" and "sanity" exceptions? I have never
even considered that these words might be offensive. Perhaps not emotionally
neutral, but then why not "poor" (performance) or "silly"? Is there some
context that I'm not aware of?

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lostapathy
This just means new words/phrases will be offensive and need purged in a few
years.

Lest we forget, “retard” used to be the kind way to describe mentally
challenged people when earlier phrases became offensive.

~~~
ShorsHammer
Hopefully all the would-be enforcers of language don't find out what happens
inside a commercial plane cockpit on landing.

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xingyzt
The more inclusive terms are also easier to understand from my perspective as
a non-native English speaker. Allowlist and legacy status, for example, are
much more literal in their meaning.

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esrauch
I agree for allowlist but not for grandfathered; as a native speaker
"grandfathered" is just an English word and I don't think it means the same
thing as "legacy status" in most cases.

To me "legacy status" sounds like "deprecated", as in "the system is still
there but we plan to get rid of it". Grandfathered means "we wouldn't add it
today, but since it's there it can continue as a first class citizen
indefinitely". A house that doesn't follow new building codes isnt torn down,
it's grandfathered in. But it's definitely not a "legacy house", it's still
just a fully functioning house that doesn't match what new construction would
be but that's ok.

~~~
mjevans
Similarly, I feel "grandfathered" implies a similar meaning as 'exempted'
(which seeing elsewhere, the meaning, but not the source propagated with the
word's use).

Compare:

The use of fax for the transmission of medics records is grandfathered. The
use of fax for the transmission of medics records is exempted.

Both are true, but grandfathered, as noted above, implies that it really
wouldn't be allowed in today but gets to exist because some people just can't
move on and look for a better technology.

(In fact, many of the reasons I hate fax are features for it's die-hard users.
It's fire and forget, open loop, low quality, and as easy as dialing a phone
entry. Also, there's no security attached to the sender or receiver.)

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revicon
As a white guy who has never experienced racism before, I don’t feel
comfortable judging weather any of these changes make sense. I would hope that
they’ve sat down with groups of people they believe they are offending with
these words and figured out if these changes actually make a difference to
them. If the have, then more power to them.

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pseudalopex
The person who initiated the effort is black.

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kyriakos
I honestly cannot understand how "sanity check" can be offensive to anyone. I
am not saying there no other ways to express the same meaning but I also don't
see why it should be changed in the first place since its already established.

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Galanwe
As a non native speaker, I do not quite understand why "dummy value" and
"sanity check" are in the list. Is there a hidden meaning behind those words?

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ddlutz
As a native speaker, I can almost understand dummy value. But sanity check
doesn't seem offensive at all. One definition of sanity is "reasonable and
rational behavior."

so sanity check would be checking if the behavior is reasonable and rational.

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tazedsoul
If you want to believe that a multi-billion dollar company cares about your
feelings or people in general simply because it has come up with its own
dictionary of acceptable words for concepts then go right ahead. What truly
has Twitter done for humanity? Allowed racists and monsters to verbally
assault anyone they choose, hiding behind anonymity? This is classic virtue
signaling, concealing an absolute void of concern for people.

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ShorsHammer
So I'm meant to associate the word follower with slave if working at Twitter?

Some unintended consequences there given how the term is used by them in
forward-facing contexts.

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coffeefirst
If people would like to do this, that's cool. As long as I can still call
myself crazy I see no reason to object.

But have no illusion: this doesn't actually count as doing something, and you
get zero accolades for it.

If you want to do something useful, and I highly encourage it, here are some
ideas: fix your platform (start by kicking the Nazis off), fix your hiring
process, and call your city council rep to ask what they're going to do to
ensure the police treat all members of the public fairly and professionally.

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KoftaBob
Pure virtue signaling, end of story.

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techntoke
What about the phrases black magic, darknet and black market?

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yaacov
Do you think any of those are common in twitter’s codebase?

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wirthjason
The security team might use white hat and black hat hackers.

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slickrick216
Already in the virtue signalling repo pipeline. Pull request submitted. Zdnet
had a faux outrage article about this yesterday.

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mnm1
The stupidity is just incredible. Let's see what happens when they take
gendered pronouns out of Spanish or other similar language. What incredible
stupidity and idiocy. I hope to never meet these idiots. This is on par with
calling the corona virus a hoax as far as stupidity. It censors extremely
common phrases. If this is what Americans think they need to do to get rid of
sexism and racism, sexism and racism will never diminish in this country.
Unbelievably insane stupidity. It really cannot be said enough.

