elephantium

You just reminded me of this

Those who champion "brutal honesty" are more interested in the brutality than the honest

I use this, and I struggle a little to disengage when the person I ask interprets it as "help me figure out how to solve this" when they don't actually have the "short answer".

life isn't fair

It's not as pithy, but I think "Just because you didn't get your way, doesn't mean it's unfair" would be a better sentiment for adults to tell children.

Or "I don't fucking care what happened, I just don't want to hear you whine about it". Hardly an acceptable way to talk to children, but I think it's what adults in my life meant when I was a child.

"it is what it is"

If it weren't what it is, well, it wouldn't be anything at all, would it?

Thanks :D

I came here to ask the same thing!

Interesting metaphor. I've never really gotten that idea -- I've never seen the connection demonstrated between the "big stuff" and seemingly innocuous things like 'main' vs. 'master'.

Also, a lot of this feels misplaced. IMO, the root problem is one of attitude where the minorities are viewed as less-human, not deserving of equal treatment or equal rights. Change will happen as those attitudes shift. I haven't seen a connection demonstrated between those attitudes and...well, pretty much any terminology issue that's come up in recent memory.

Yeah, I can't really explain it. Seems kinda silly, doesn't it?

just another way of staying ignorant and insensitive to those events.

I don't really see how that follows. Would you mind elaborating?

I'm a dev, and I'm the opposite. At my work, we use main over master. I thought it was a little silly when we first switched, but now I'm used to it. It's an arbitrary label anyway -- could easily use trunk/branch from SVN or release/develop or any number of other labels to keep track of code.

Hell, we got a new dev on the team a month or two ago, and he tends to name things 'feat/do-the-thing' instead of 'feature/make-it-go'.

It's not as big a deal as people online make it out to be.

Bypass the whole debate, adopt SVN's 'trunk/branch' terms.

Great response, thanks for writing this. I live in the US, and your Coon -> Cheer cheese reminds me of Land O'Lakes butter -- there was a brouhaha over a decision to remove a Native American woman from the packaging. Same result, it's still in the butter section of the market.

My point is that small token changes cost virtually nothing

Well-put. I've been in the position of complaining about this type of change before, and this is a perfect counterpoint to that mindset. I've often said "What do we want? Police to face accountability when they commit crimes! What do we actually get? We're going to use the term 'main' instead of 'master' for programming things!"

What we so often forget in that moment of "What, I have to re-learn some terminology? Ugh, friction!" is exactly your point about small courtesies. Something doesn't have to be a Big Damn Deal to be worthwhile.