On Thu, 2019-04-25 at 13:04 +0200, Bastien Nocera wrote:
Besides, we can't use "mainline" anyway, as that is a reference to intravenous drug taking and since we can't be expected tell homonyms apart or pass basic primary school comprehension exercises by applying our knowledge of context to the words we see, we'll *obviously* interpret all instances of the word "mainline" as references to drugs... right?This is a "slippery slope" logical fallacy. Are you going to argue that we can't use "trunk" either because of its link to deforestation? ;)
Why not? It makes just as much sense as eschewing "master" and "mainline". I see it more as "proof by contradiction". The logic in this request appears to be of the form: • Word X has bad connotations • Word X' is a homonym of word X • Therefore we must avoid all uses of word X and its homonyms like X' with related etymology. The logic is just fundamentally flawed, which is quite clear to see as soon as you try to apply it to the general case. And if you want to claim that I'm making the logic excessively broad, and that the case of master¹ vs. master⁶ is somehow different to the case of mainline¹ vs. mainline², or trunk¹ vs. trunk², then I would happily listen to your explanation of what makes them different. As a software engineer, I much prefer to fix bugs rather than paper over them with workarounds. And if the bug here is that some people wouldn't pass a high school comprehension test because they can't tell the difference between different words that happen to be spelled the same, then changing a small handful of examples doesn't really address the real problem. It's a workaround, not a fix.
Attachment:
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature