> Why _wouldn’t_ I want to avoid using any but your last category?

Thing is, _you_ are free to avoid anything you want for whatever reason you want. It is when someone else (e.g. myself) who doesn't want to have his language policed is faced with a prospect of being told to change his language, that he may become upset. After all, if you recognise that language is part of a person's identity, and that identity is important (as those who champion such linguistic changes almost invariably tend to claim), it is really inconsistent then to be demanding that people change the way they talk.

> it is really inconsistent then to be demanding that people change the way they talk.

Okay, but Stanford is not demanding that; this site is about words they don’t want used on their own websites and marketing materials. This isn’t a list of words they don’t want you to use, it’s a list of words they don’t want to use. The obvious solution if you don’t want to be policed by this word list is to not work at Stanford.

> Okay, but Stanford is not demanding that; this site is about words they don’t want used on their own websites and marketing materials. This isn’t a list of words they don’t want you to use, it’s a list of words they don’t want to use. The obvious solution if you don’t want to be policed by this word list is to not work at Stanford.

I'm a little confused by the transition that happened within this paragraph. You start with a language used on websites and in marketing materials, and end by saying not to work at Stanford (which I don't :-) ). But there is a long range of cases that fall in between marketing materials and total strangers. Will professors, who are neither websites nor marketing materials, be obliged (or "advised") to abide by the code? Will the students? If someone working/studying at Stanford thinks that this is stupid, is he free to ignore the advice? Or does he have to leave? If someone associated with Stanford writes a book or a paper, will he need to have the language of his manuscript checked? What about a master's or a phd thesis? What about a talk? Lots of uncertainty there.

That's exactly what I am talking about :-) In my idiolect, it's a he; in your idiolect, it's a they; our idiolects are perfectly understandable to both of us; and yet, instead of simply recognising a variation in my speech, you feel an urge to change my language.

Remarkably, it's exactly the opposite of the public attitude towards regional dialects. Where previously it was common to correct speakers of non-prestigious dialects, it is now required to be accepting and tolerant.

I take issue with “perfectly understandable”.

I think many (most?) people hearing or reading that would make an assumption from your use of ‘he’ that you expect that professors and students are usually male. Perhaps that you believe they _should_ be male. If you really mean them to be gender-neutral, you are not communicating clearly. I would argue that this has always been true - but even if I’m wrong about that, it’s true for modern English usage.

The hypothetical "someone" in my sentence (a professor or a student) is indeed probably male if I look at him closely. I pass no comment on whether professors or students _should_ generally be male; but at the same time, have no qualms with imagining them as such. I understand that many think differently, and have seen plenty of texts where an imaginary character of unspecified sex is introduced with a third-person singular feminine pronoun (a random example: "For a Product Owner to properly adapt a product, she needs some empirical evidence, something to inspect", from "The Professional Product Owner" by Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham). My argument is that if should be perfectly fine for a writer to use the default gender that he is most comfortable with.

One would hope it isn't intended to imply that, but if not, it's doing an extremely poor job at it.

Here's two almost-adjacent entries:

> hip-hip hurray, hip hip hooray > This term was used by German citizens during the Holocaust as a rallying cry when they would hunt down Jewish citizens living in segregated neighborhoods.

> Jewed > This term is based on a stereotype that people of Jewish descent are cheap and/or hoard money.

The latter is, as I said, a well-known slur that any Jew would find offensive. The former is an extremely commonplace expression which is allegedly offensive due to a history that I've never in my life heard of before, and which seems on a quick search to be quite dubiously evidenced.

Without knowing the actual context of these, one might very well be persuaded by this list that "hip, hip, hooray" was more offensive than "Jewed" - after all, a rallying cry for a genocide sounds more harmful than a mere ethnic stereotype!

It seems that the etymology is actually mistaken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hep-Hep_riots

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hip_hip_hooray

I've heard the earlier theory (that it was an acronym for "Hierosolyma est perdita" which was supposed to have been a Crusader slogan), but Wiktionary thinks this is a false etymology.

I'm Ashkenazi Jewish and have never heard any Jewish or non-Jewish person claim to have personally associated the "hip hip hooray" cheer with antisemitism. Perhaps that association, even if it's etymologically incorrect, would have been top-of-mind for many Europeans in the 1820s, but I don't think that's so today.

Yes, the use of "hip hip hip hoorah" (with three "hips") in English predates the Hep Hep riots.

Most etymologies attributed to acronyms for words pre-20th century are usually false.

Moreover, the same "hip-hip hooray" rally cry was used by the Red Army, who (while not specifically siding with Jewish people) liberated quite a number of people from the death camps.

> the same "hip-hip hooray" rally cry was used by the Red Army

Which Red Army? Unless it's the Chinese Red Army (which I have no knowledge about), but rather the Russian (Soviet) Red Army, then, firstly, the battle cry of its soldiers was not "hip-hip hooray", but rather "ura" (cognate of the English "hurrah"); and, secondly, this battle cry is much older than the Red Army. It's an old word; almost certainly a borrowing into Russian; but in which century (seventeenth? sixteenth? older?), and from which language, I do not know.

Well, this is the first time I hear "Hipp, hipp, Hurra" (the proper German version, since hurray is definetly not German) being linked to the Nazis and anti-semitism... And us Germans are rather sensitive about that

It says, at the top of the page:

The purpose of this website is to educate people about the possible impact of the words we use. Language affects different people in different ways. We are not attempting to assign levels of harm to the terms on this site. We also are not attempting to address all informal uses of language.

This website focuses on potentially harmful terms used in the United States, starting with a list of everyday language and terminology. Our "suggested alternatives" are in line with those used by peer institutions and within the technology community.

I don't actually see how this is an argument against my point at all.

They say "we are not attempting to assign levels of harm to the terms on this site", and then proceed to list a huge number of terms, some of which are almost universally viewed as discriminatory or harmful and some of which are almost universally viewed as _not_ discriminatory or harmful. They may not be explicitly claiming that these terms have equivalent negative impact, but the presentation does nothing to suggest otherwise, and in many cases neither do the explanations.

As I said in my original comment, it's an "arson, murder, and jaywalking" approach - as if someone had just given you a list saying "these things are illegal, don't do them" without noting that one of them can be punished by life in prison and another is so widely disregarded that it'll be viewed as odd if you never do it.

> Do you just object to the existence of the list?

I object to the existence of this particular list because I think it's extremely poorly done - to the point of being actively harmful to efforts to reduce offensive language - and would be incredibly confusing to anyone who didn't already have the fairly deep linguistic and cultural competence required to know which parts to take seriously and which parts to ignore.

I don't object to the general existence of lists of this type, but I do think they're often subject to the same pathologies this one is.

> I still think my original question stands - why wouldn’t I want to avoid most of these terms? Isn’t the list useful if I would?

I think a huge section of this list is not helpful to anybody. "Red team", "yellow team", and "black box" have nothing to do with race whatsoever, for example, nor would a reasonable person think they did; eliminating them from your vocabulary would do no more to address racial injustice than eliminating "armadillo" would. And I do think there are costs to urging people to monitor their speech to greater and greater degrees for rapidly decreasing - and in many cases zero - benefit.

Thanks. I understand your position better now, and agree with more of it than I first thought. I don’t think our positions are so divergent as to be problematic in real life - though I suspect I will continue to monitor my speech a little more than I you think is advisable.

I wish online forums encouraged civil discussion like this more than they seem to. So much knee-jerk even here.

I see a list like this potentially being more harmful than helpful in a few respects:

1. By saying certain phrases could be understood to be harmful, even when they aren't commonly understood to be and explicitly don't have racist or sexist etymologies, the list is actually reinforcing the threads of harmful stereotypes in our language. Black box is not a racist term; adding it to a list like this just associates black=bad, which is not something we should want at all.

2. Lists like this encourage black-and-white thinking about language that ignores context. It's the same sort of thinking that leads to your white uncle complaining that rappers use the n word, so why can't he? Words don't hurt; how words are used hurt.

3. Lists like this are ripe for abuse. While I have heard interesting discussions about how certain language can be harmful (The Allusionist podcast recently had an interesting discussion over terms like neuro-divergent, neuro-typical, autism and so on), it is often used in a bullying way to dismiss and discredit someone who is trying to engage in good faith rather than to educate. Consider "rule of thumb". The etymology presented is wrong, but wide spread. Maybe the fact that many people believe this is enough to avoid it, but the list doesn't present this nuance and instead perpetuates the myth.

I see it quite opposite.

"We are not attempting to assign levels of harm to the terms on this site" means literally nothing but "we shouldn't be held accountable for intermingling actual racial slurs with misinterpreted Wikipedia articles".

I don't see how trying to cover your ass at the start of an article somehow invalidates the content of the article.

> term was used by German citizens during the Holocaust as a rallying cry when they would hunt down Jewish citizens living in segregated neighborhoods.

Hmm, I bet they also drank water after hunting down Jews. Drinking water literally makes you a Nazi!

Seriously though, where does this stop? Don't they see the absurdity? It almost feels like absurdity is the goal.

It stops when they reach the end of the euphemism treadmill. There is no goal here, only the desire to be seen to be doing something. When you reward people for catching rats, they don't kill all the rats, as then there won't be any rats to catch next season.

Except that 'treadmills' were used as punishment devices in prisons, so the preferred alternative is 'euphemism exercise machine'. Except that "exercise" is ableist and so the real preferred alternative is...

> The latter is, as I said, a well-known slur that any Jew would find offensive.

You'd be incorrect, as I happen to know a Jew who some might consider "based" and knowingly says things like "...so I Jewed it..." and so on. Like, he literally just comes out and says these things in casual conversation and humour.

Not sure what you're meaning here. Slurs aren't slurs without the context of hatred or disdain, and an obvious example of self deprecating humor doesn't mean that your friend would enjoy a stranger directing that word towards him.

Pretty much no one would claim the n-word is not a slur just because some black people use it amongst each other.

As we know, music created by artists who identify as "black" has never had racial slurs against that same group included.

"Finding something offensive" is not mutually exclusive with "doing that thing yourself".