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Would you like to read this story and support this website at the same time? Guess what, you can! Just become a member. It’s easy, hopefully fun, and keeps us in business. Regardless, thank you!
Top photo: Depositphotos.com
I’d sum this Slack up thusly: Everyone was correct, and no one was wrong, but a decision was made.
Handsome Goose FTW.
And kicking puppies is just introducing young dogs to the concept of flight?
You lost me. Anodyne comment elicits unexpected reaction? Do you kick puppies? That’s just wrong.
I was calmly reading the article when I came across David saying that Fort Lee was gone. I rushed to Google Maps to see if, indeed, Fort Lee, NJ was ‘gone.’ Nope, still there. Whew! I grew up only a few blocks from the border in Englewood, NJ.
Climate Change
Ft. Lee, Virginia!
The military base on which my dad used to work.
Def mixed opinion on my part. “Scalper” seems like the most appropriate term to use in this case, and I don’t think there’s a 100% match with anything else and I’m mostly fine. However I always get a strong “ick” feeling when they call getting outs in cricket “taking scalp”.
Definitely overreacting. Scalpers is an accepted term for a flipper, reseller, greedy mf, period. The actual origin of it has little to do with its current, accepted use. Another period.
Do we start roasting millennials now for saying literally when they mean figuratively? Figure of speech is quite the accepted lexical flourish.
Plus penguins are now hurt.
First we start a trade war with the penguins, now using penguist racial slurs is ok. What is this world coming to?
I am fine with a war on penguins. Of all animals to hate I hate penguins and Canada goose.
“Maybe we shouldn’t call it a hed” for the win.
In the second half of my career, I installed software for TV stations and networks to put newscasts together. Pretty early on I was doing an install for a new Univision station in Chicago.
The editorial staff were all Spanish speakers (and mostly bilingual and being very fluent in English, which was helpful since I took French). From Spain, Cuba, to all of LATAM, to the Philippines. The production staff (the technical people who actually put the show to air,) were all English-only speakers head-hunted from other stations around Chicago. So, it was pretty amusing to watch the first few shows going to air in essentially Spanglish.
The editorial staff, coming from around the world, all understood each other, but several told me (in English) that they had to be very careful around slang because something that was fine or funny from where they came from could be horribly offensive to someone from another region.
This was well before being PC was a thing in the States.
Should have just gone with “the guys that sell the tickets for the sold-out events”
“…for a very large profit percentage point”
I love how Torch stayed out of it until the SLAM DUNK(s) at the very end; Jason FTW!
It’s literally the most Torch thing ever.
Language changes, and the people making a living analyzing every word, should be aware of that and be the first to adjust rather than simply going with the current Zeitgeist.
But I guess that was my point. People who use and apply language as a core part of their day-to-day interaction with the world are important gatekeepers who make changes and can’t feign passivity.
If all the people working with communication every day took that path, language would never change, and not even the obviously problematic issues would ever be addressed.
I think we all should acknowledge our influence and make the best possible use of it.
It comes down to how the editorial team wants to balance potential clicks versus being aware of potential insensitivities. The story did well enough at 15,000 views. Still, with how passionate people are about flippers (see any coverage on TickerMaster debacles, especially involving Taylor Swift), there was a potential that the term “scalpers” would have cracked an SEO algorithm.
As for why I appreciate this site, there’s thought and care that goes into the headlines and the stories that rise above other publications that focus solely on clickbait and gaming the system. It’s almost as if you ask yourself, “What would a herb do?” and then do the opposite.
I don’t see ‘flippers’ as being a synonym for ‘scalpers’. Maybe just me, but there’s a connotation that flippers generally make some kind of improvement before selling. Scalpers simply mark up and resell.
Agreed, it’s a term for a specific practice: hoarding the supply a limited good (usually tickets) so you can resell it at inflated prices to desperate people.
Scalping is just one of the many abhorrent practices of my European forebears, but I personally take no offense in the modern usage of the term.
I agree, maybe ‘resellers’ would be closer to ‘scalpers’ but it dosent quite convey the same negative tone.
Team, it brings me real joy to see a staff caring so much about words. The utter lack of respect, even interest, by so many other publications (who trade in language!) is grating. Thanks. I truly appreciate the professionalism.
Hell, especially by many of our political representatives.
May I offer a replacement, Disingenuous Trade Retailer, or DTR. Pronounced, and can be used as “Dieter”, with no disrespect to the fine work of Mike Myers.
Genius; we need more Autopian-specific jargon!
To me the irony is they removed part of the hed, thus making themselves scalpers.
I’ll see myself out.
Jason only pops up at end to talk about enemas? Yeah, that tracks. Tracy being so opposed to ‘scalper’? Now that was a surprise.
If you have a belt load of trophy scalps you are a Toy Speculator.
It is as simple as that.
I appreciate this conversation because I had no idea anyone took issue with the word “scalper” at all. I’m admittedly inclined to follow the AP’s lead on this due to the lack of clarity on its origins, though. If it does refer to indigenous folks, then yikes, and that’s a definite nope on further usage from me, but the “fur trappers who only sold part of the animal” story seems more fitting as the origin of a term for rip-off artists.
Even then, if enough folks claim it hits too close to home, then maybe it’s time to stop, and that’s fine, too. Primary vs. master bedroom is a good example — I watch a crapload of house videos to try and take my minds off of The Horrors, and “primary suite” has become as natural to hear as the original term, and I think it actually fits better. Same goes with finding insults that aren’t the r-slur or “gaaaaaay” (ahem, millennials): there are so many more scathing ways to insult a fool that don’t also put down whole groups of folks who don’t deserve the hate or stigma. Language evolves. It’s always evolving and always has evolved.
The final headline worked, either way. It’s toy drama! I clicked, I read, and I really need to get around to writing that book on Puffalumps.
As always, a great comment from Stef.
I’m going to throw this in the mix .
The name Mercedes is of Spanish origin, derived from “María de las Mercedes,” meaning “Our Lady of Mercy.” It translates to “mercies” in Latin, reflecting themes of kindness and compassion.
From reading your past articles I think this choice of names for yourself fits you perfectly.
Y’all are doing a great job and articles like this keep me coming back many times a day.
Thanks again
My goodness, you all have some interesting conversations. When I was still working, me and some of my colleagues would have similarly interesting conversations, but we didn’t have Slack and had to do them via email.
I’m only offended that you used the term “wack” instead of “whack.” But maybe I’m too old to know the vernacular these days. The latter was a sound when someone got called out and smacked in the face. The former would likely not mean anything to any of us. At least in type.
Anyway, thanks for sharing.
It’s short for “wacky”, although you aren’t saving that much typing.
Ah. Thanks for the explainer.
Signed,
Gramps.
That’s wack
Wacky tabacky on 4/20
Wondering about ‘price gouging’ now, which is a weird term altogether. Like it sounds like the prices are getting gouged, like eye gouging, but I guess it’s also people are getting gouged by prices, like knife gouging.
English is funny.
This is the kind of discussion that should be held in newsrooms.
Some of the words we use have been used so long that their original meaning is obscured to the user.
I remember as a kid, any time we felt ripped off, we’d say we got “gypped.” None of us had any idea that the word stemmed from “gypsies,” because their stereotype was that of a people who routinely ripped people off. Once most of us learned the origin, we stopped using the word. None of us died.
There’s a common idea these days that if we said or did something in the 1950s, we should always be able to say or do it. That if we remove words “just because” they have racist origins we are somehow diminishing our lives.
In my case, it was a word. I haven’t used it in decades. I never missed using it, and in not using it it’s possible I avoided making someone feel unhappy. Why that’s seen as a weakness or a character flaw is entirely beyond me.
Good on you guys for being open to change.
Kinda like when somebody was negotiating downward, they were trying to “Jew” the other side down.
I innately hated that term. I know (and love) many Jewish people. I don’t (as far as I know) know any Gypsies. And I would probably love and be accepting of them as well.
Stereotypes may have had a kernel of truth, often outdated, but painting with a broad brush is always a mistake.
In 5th grade one of my fellow students used this statement. My teacher, who was Jewish, handled it very gracefully. I remember being aghast at my classmate for saying it.
Sounds like a Seinfeld episode!
Ill side with Matt on this one- sometimes words gain new meaning. Sometimes they become offensive. Other times, the offensive word becomes applied to somebody else. And while I have family who were born (and will be at dinner this weekend) before Sears coined the term ‘Master Bedroom’, nobody will be there who can recall scalpers being anything other than a shady reseller who buys out the stock of pokemon cards so that little jimmy cant get a new mudkip.
I’m a Diglet man.
Student teachers don’t work with master teachers anymore… the term is “cooperating teacher.”
we also no longer say master and slave drives in IT for the same reason. Primary and secondary work just fine.
Same for plug and socket with respect to cables. They’re no longer male and female.
“excising”
Taxing, or removing surgically.
Hmm.
Sort of how scalp means both as a noun, the top of one’s head, and as a verb, to cut. See also the word “scalpel” which comes from the Latin scalpere, meaning “to scratch” or “carve”.
I was in a conversation with someone recently who was upset with the word master, because of one of its many meanings.
I am of the opinion that it is better to dilute the meaning of offending words by using them more rather than that strengthening their offensiveness by using them less.
I propose “scalpeler.”
That encompasses surgeons, kids dissecting frogs, and members of the model railroad club scenery committee. And others of course.
I propose a counter point to your opinion:
The people who feel harmed by these words may never be able to let go of some kind of injustice or trauma surrounding it. Using them more is likely to make their feelings seem marginalized. If we, as a society, can avoid making that happening simply by not using a word, than we should. Society is about making compromises for each other and the collective good, not about attempting to dilute the meaning of bad things.
This is an interesting editorial discussion.
There is something similar happening in the IT security industry. It appears the terms ‘blacklisting’ and ‘whitelisting’ have been replaced (at least in part) with ‘blocklisting’ and ‘allowlisting’. I don’t recall ever hearing anyone complain about the use of black and white in this context, but that doesn’t mean it never happened. OTOH the new terms are probably more clear and no one will be surprised that the tech industry made up two more words.
There are some phrases like that that we don’t think about regularly that I wish we were. Hell, I still haven’t switched my language for the ends of extension cords like I wish I would.
But I did manage to change my automatic sneeze response from “bless you” to “gesundheit” after 18 years with the former, so anything is possible.
You mean male/female? (End of extension cord).
Use penis end and vagina end, so you don’t force gendering on it.
That’s gold.
But could we still refer to an adapter that converts one to the other as a “gender bender”, or would that be inappropriate?
Yeah. Saying “prong”/”plug” and “hole” end sounds like you’re inexperienced, while something like “input” and “output” ends isn’t immediately intuitive to me.
“plug” and “receptacle” are used for this sometimes
I feel funny, mostly negative, ways about “master” and “slave.” It’s horribly coded language at best *but* when a device isn’t secondary, strictly, not downstream, but slaved (wince) to another device or entity, whaddya call it? Secondary implies redundancy. Downstream is sort of a parallel concept. Dependent? Auxiliary (no, see: redundancy)?
I know GitHub changed “master” to “main,” and I have this likely silly worry that “master” meaning one who is highly proficient or skilled will be unusable. Like George Costanza being the master of his domain – it was silly, and not remotely an allusion to slavery. But it *did* mean he had control – is that an acceptable usage? I’d say so but maybe it’s icky?
None of this is a defense of that language, just cause mechjaz didn’t puzzle it out, of course. Just sort of thinking through the thing out loud.
Very good points. When I was a DJ I knew a more complex light setup would involve a DMX light system and they often have a “master” light hooked up to….well, the term you used above. Very uncomfortable.
I’ve also head “leader” and “follower” as less charged language to use for the same thing, and that’s still intuitive to understand.
I don’t think the word has to go away when it has context like “master of one’s domain” or “master crafter”, “master engineer”, etc. It’s when it’s used in isolation or paired with “slave” when that awful language can be easily avoided.
On the other hand, I guess “Skilled” can be used depending on the contexts, too? I would assume a “master engineer” has other engineers that report to them, or has judgment deferred to them for the most technical questions. But when describing their experience, “skilled” might be sufficient?
Well, master originally meant a teacher, or instructor in how to do something, then it spread out to telling what to do. The slavery connotation came thousands of years later.
Well, there is servo. But servo has the same root as slave, both are from the word for the Slavic people.
The master/main thing was dumb and quite a few of us (myself included) explicitly set init.defaultBranch to master in the global Git config to this day.
One of the worst examples of manufactured outrage ever. And there was plenty of cost for newcomers in all the tutorials and examples that were broken as a result. Your “mouthbreathers” comment is typical of the time where the people trying to keep a widely used default that had no racist origins whatsoever were cast as the unreasonable ones.
Though maybe people learning that master isn’t special and you can use whatever name you want was an unintentional good outcome. So many devs don’t take the time to really learn a tool they use every day.
And yes, David is wrong here without question.
See, this is *also* something I agree with.
This is real dangerous territory so I’ll try to tread lightly (for a change), but I have seen personally and at large people blow non-issues or genuine mistakes into fabricated outrage. Master as the primary source of information? Sure. Master/slave as a nomenclature for a system topology? Let’s clean that up.
Here’s a story that I’m embarrassed about and frustrated by:
I had a friend that was trying to get pregnant with her husband. We were chatting one day and she was telling me this and I said “I’d be so happy if you were the mother of my children.” What I meant was “you’re going to be a great mother, this is really big and exciting.” But the thing I said was this really clumsy lump of a statement, not remotely a coy come-on or anything of the sort, just a good intention, poorly phrased.
After that she got weird, and a week or two later said she couldn’t be my friend any more because I had reduced her to her ability to have children. What? What?? We had been friends for two years, and I apologized profusely, saying oh my god no I’m so sorry, that’s not what I meant at all. But it wasn’t enough and I don’t talk to her anymore.
I kept thinking about it though. Yes. It was clumsy, not the best way to say what I wanted to say. At the same time, it was said with the best intention and apologized in every way, and it still wasn’t enough, and I reached the conclusion: to hell with that friend. If it was that easy to lose her, it would have been something else sooner than later.
The moral of this parable is that relentless outrage despite absence of historical/cultural context, or the extension by weak proxy of one concept to an unrelated one for no apparent and otherwise justified reason than having something to be upset about, is frustrating and diminishes expression and discourse. There was no suggestion that I wanted a relationship or children with my friend, and my apologies didn’t do anything to clear up the misunderstanding. She doesn’t have to be my friend, but I’d appreciate it if she had made that decision on a stronger basis than my gaffe. Teasing offense out of every possible interaction makes you internally fragile and externally unstable.
We don’t lose anything fixing master/slave, whatever words those end up being. Changing master on GitHub (I don’t care that it is now main it’s the *changing* that is the silly/frustrating part) was kind of needless. Did anyone anywhere seriously think that a branch in version control was a hitherto unnoticed nod to human slavery?
We should strive to be inclusive, generous, and kind. We should also not be a bunch of fucking idiots* about doing so. 😀
*And the word cycle begins anew…
Yes master/main is, for me, in the pantheon of Slacktivism along with paper straws and the legendary Kony 2012.
Blacklisting still exists, but in other and “dirtier” contexts. For example, I’m pretty sure a former coworker got me blacklisted at the company he went to, because when I applied there all I got was an email stating “this is to inform you that your application will be given no further consideration”. If that that doesn’t say don’t bother applying here, I don’t know what does.
Redlining is another interesting “colorful” term that has multiple meanings. In the automotive realm, it means taking an engine to its max rpm. In banking, it is/was a very dirty practice of marking boundaries on a map and allowing or denying loans based on “demographics” (straight up discrimination). In construction, it’s making changes to the existing plans, either to account for intended changes or as-built deviations. There’s probably more.
One of those really bothers me. The others (that I know of), don’t bother me at all.
we also no longer say master and slave drives in IT for the same reason. Primary and secondary work just fine.
As a former (read: failed) writer, i have opinions on this which don’t matter at all and what i primarily appreciate here is that these sorts of conversations are happening behind the scenes at Autopian HQ. I just love to talk about words. I think i miss editing more than writing if i’m honest. Also, as per usual, Torch is my spirit animal* here–i am always the one being as satirically unuseful as possible in most substantive conversations these days.
*This term is likely no longer acceptable to use in this manner.
I think I fall square in the middle of the amount of PC language debate, but I love to trip up people when they start asking about spirit animals. I start this whole diatribe about how it’s appropriation and inappropriate to use that term unless they actually follow a belief system that has spirit animals and on and on and on. Sometimes it’s just fun to see people squirm.
Interestingly re: your username
Up until recently, robot meant enslaved person in Czech, or robota for ‘forced labor’. They couldn’t very well call them slaves, since they were Slavic. Robot entered the English language from the English translation of K. Čapek’s play R.U.R. ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’ in 1920.
Any Czech speakers here who can clarify?
I saw something about a decade ago of, “Replace ‘spirit animal’ with ‘patronus’,” which was frankly a good move until JKR’s behavior over the last ten years made me not want to give any cultural cachet to the series.