tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12546956.post3070550963430395777..comments2024-03-09T20:43:59.063-05:00Comments on The Language Lover's Blog: The language of engineersLanguage Loverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17095286029520305813noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12546956.post-37398052358113196112014-01-25T13:25:57.580-05:002014-01-25T13:25:57.580-05:00On a lighter note, I am remembering those stupid &...On a lighter note, I am remembering those stupid "-er" jokes from college, eg "Harmonic Oscillator? But I just met her!" Most involved some kind of technical jargon which just entered our young scientist/engineer's lexicon. They got old, really fast, especially if you had some tone-deaf punster of a friend who would tell the jokes on infinite repeat. I remember one person came up with a retort; an "-um" joke. "The Official Dictum? But, he just met him!" Not all that funny, either.cdwinanthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16019603471919442937noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12546956.post-71964320685715019662014-01-25T13:20:14.974-05:002014-01-25T13:20:14.974-05:00I came back to your blog to read your post about t...I came back to your blog to read your post about the pay-grade comment. I'm sorry that was so difficult, but kudos for being able to turn that incident into an opportunity, once again, to look deeper at yourself and to continue to question the different standards people hold for language by race and sex. <br /><br />This particular discussion here resonates, but I comment to ask, have you looked at all into the work of Belgian philosopher Luce Irigaray? She asserts that the scientific framework (the theory, the mathematical framework)is inherently sexist. She goes beyond language. One of her famous arguments is that more progress has been made in the field of solid versus fluid mechanics because the former is an inherently male system, the latter female. I have big problems with this argument. In fact, I find it sexist and arbitrarily categorical to say that solids and male, and fluids are female, and rings of something that Camille Paglia would say (whom I also have a hard time taking seriously). Anyway, its easy to target Irigaray for being preposterous, but still interesting to read her arguments, then the arguments around her arguments.<br /><br />Here is a good summary of some of her views on science;<br />http://www.math.tohoku.ac.jp/~kuroki/Sokal/bricmont/node17.htmlcdwinanthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16019603471919442937noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12546956.post-15517165762828354282013-12-30T00:39:37.804-05:002013-12-30T00:39:37.804-05:00Thank you for the comment, Michael.
Even if one...Thank you for the comment, Michael. <br /><br />Even if one considers brevity and clarity to be the only relevant metrics for whether a term is optimal, clarity still depends on what images one most closely associates with the master/slave term. Probably most programmers are like me, far removed from the realities of slavery, and think only of the abstract, functional meaning: a master gives orders to a slave. For others, the term might evoke images of whipping, hard labor, and separation of families--emotionally distressing and hardly relevant to software architecture.<br /><br />I also think that there are other considerations besides brevity and clarity in determining whether a term is optimal. I'm willing to use a few extra words to prevent discouraging people from groups that are already underrepresented in the industry. We've seen precedence for this, for example, when programming textbooks started using "he or she" and "his or her" rather than the male pronoun exclusively (although evolving concepts of gender mean we'll have to rethink that as well). And in this particular example, there are many other less emotionally loaded metaphors that one could use to describe the same relationship.Language Loverhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17095286029520305813noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12546956.post-9540931754879759102013-12-28T18:45:35.045-05:002013-12-28T18:45:35.045-05:00But I've got to ask - what if Master/Slave is ...But I've got to ask - what if Master/Slave is appropriate for *machines* precisely for the same reason it's not appropriate for humans?<br /><br />This is not to challenge your point about choosing appropriate terms that are not alienating. But what if a term is in some sense optimal (the closest and shortest words a language can use to describe a concept)?Michael Tuchmanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10114540761606597999noreply@blogger.com