Software engineering as a profession is pretty notorious for being less inclusive that it could and should be. When a person of color in your organization speaks up and says that looking at "masters" and "slaves" in their code every day makes them uncomfortable, there are two ways to react. You can either say "you know what, I've never thought of it that way before, and so your complaint is clearly nonsense," or you can say "you know what, I've never thought of it that way before, and I may not fully understand your point, but I value you as a colleague and am willing to put in a bit of work to change to a nomenclature we can all feel good about." Which one you choose speaks volumes about your organization.
+1
I am old enough to recall clearly the days when there was a huge backlash about words like "fireman" and "chairman." And yet somehow we've managed to shift to "firefighter" and "chair," and the world hasn't ended.
If this bothers you, I'd suggest you think long and hard about why. Either the specific words we use matter, or they don't. If you believe words matter, then it makes complete sense to think about why using certain terms may land hard on friends/coworkers who are different from you.* If you don't believe words matter, then why exactly are you so angry about changing them?
But wait, it's Orwell in action!! Uh, yeah, no. Don't even try. Doublespeak is expressly designed to obfuscate the truth by reversing the plain meaning of words -- good is bad, bad is good -- in a cynical attempt to buttress government power. You know, politician-speak. What we are talking about here is the exact opposite: making language more clear and more direct by using terms that literally describe what is happening, and that have the added bonus of not perpetuating long-held stereotypes and alienating/hurting members of our society.
Finally, I do think it is interesting that the knee-jerk response to this sort of thing is "free speech!" Because you are literally complaining about how someone else has chosen to exercise
their free speech rights. The reality is that every single person here is entirely free to continue to refer to the master/slave relationship as much as you want, and the government has zero right to penalize you for doing so. And every single person here has exactly the same right to say "I'm not going to use that term any more."
What you're really complaining about is capitalism -- because the government can't restrict your speech, but your employer sure can. We've already established that your employer has the First Amendment right to decide what terms it wants to use for different aspects of its business. And as the boss, it also has the right to require you to use those terms for consistency and clarity of communications. If they want to call a male connector a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious connector, and they want to call a female connector Jo, then it's your job to call a male connector a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious connector and a female connector Jo. If you don't like the terms they want to use for various things, you have every right to advocate within your company to change them ("boss, do you really want to make us write out 'supercalifragilisticexpialidocious' every single time we need to refer to that kind of connector?"). And if your boss does not agree with your reasoning, you have every right in our capitalist economy to leave for another job where they use language you are more comfortable with. Or, you know, to go vent on a discussion board about all the dumb-ass things your company is doing, just like everyone else does.
*And if you don't innately "get" why some people who are not you are bothered by those terms, perhaps instead of dismissing their experience as ridiculous, do a little research into the long history of why the good guy always wears the white hat and the bad guy always wears the black one.
