The most politically incorrect,...
Do you claim to be a master of disco dancing and a slave to fashion? If so, watch out, because you could be the next victim of the political correctness brigade who take offence where none exists.
The words master and slave have long been used in technology to mean a system where one component has total control over another, where one issues orders and the other follows them without any negotiation. Your car may have a master brake cylinder which you operate with the foot pedal, and it passes the commands on to slave brake cylinders located on each wheel. If you go to a concert, some of the stage lights are master lights, wired up to the lighting control booth, and hanging off those are slave lights which take their commands from their master light. You've probably never thought twice about having a BT master socket for your phone connection, the master disk of a recording, a master copy of a document, or a master key to the locks in a building.
The master and slave terminology has long been used to refer to components within software, but the creators of the Python programming language are considering changing the terms master and slave for fear they might cause offence. As is so often the case, it isn't clear if anyone has been offended by this terminology, only that some have taken it upon themselves to decide others should be offended. Quite what they should be renamed to isn't clear. Parent and child? But that could be deemed offensive to anyone who has been exploited as child labour.
This isn't the first time that this phrase has been expunged from a programming language. Drupal, the website content management system, has already been revised to remove the terms, in their case using the replacement words primary and replica, as have the database engines Redis, Django, and CouchDB.
Examples of this political correctness concern go back at least fifteen years, when it was named as the most politically insensitive word of the year in 2004 by the Global Language Monitor. At that time, the Los Angeles local authority directed electronics manufacturers to stop using the terms, but following a public outcry and much derision, they changed their position to say it was a suggestion, not a directive.
Our life is riddled with innocent terms which people can take offence at, if they choose to. In the past, when building website and database forms, we have been asked not to use the word "disable" when talking about greying out a control button, just in case people in wheelchairs take offence. We have also been asked not to refer to the people who use the system as users in case they think we are calling them druggies, and have been asked if traffic is an appropriate way to describe visitors to a website. Your spam filters are surely going to be in trouble if you have a blacklist and a whitelist, and goodness knows why Mary Whitehouse never saw fit to complain about electrical plugs and sockets being routinely described as male and female.
A debate over using the words master and slave for inanimate objects might make some people feel better about our inglorious history but the bigger issue should be that slavery still exists today and is largely ignored. Did you know that in the UK alone, over 5,000 people were referred to British authorities last year as potential victims of slavery, and about one third of those were victims of forced prostitution and sexual exploitation.
27th September 2018
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.