Some things just leave me speechless and looking for the planetary CTL-ALT-DEL keys.


www.snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/master.asp

Master/Slave    

 
Claim:   The County of Los Angeles has requested that equipment vendors avoid using the industry term "Master/Slave" in product descriptions and labelling.

Status:   True.

Origins:   Social
changes of our era have been accompanied by linguistic changes: as discrimination based upon race, gender, or physical condition has become less socially acceptable, we began to frown upon the use of pejorative terms associated with race, moved towards more gender-neutral usages of language (e.g., 'chairperson' instead of 'chairman'), and replaced terms for describing the disabled with less stigmatizing ones (e.g., 'mentally handicapped' rather than 'retarded').

Along with these linguistic changes have come tales of the "political correctness run amok" variety — cases where certain usages were deemed unacceptable merely because they bore a resemblance to terms now considered inappropriate, even though the usages had little or nothing in common with the now-inappropriate terms in a linguistic sense. For example, we've read of the 1999 incident in which a mayoral aide (temporarily) lost his job for using the word 'niggardly' in a staff meeting, even though the word's origins have nothing to do with race, and even though the aide used the word correctly (to mean 'miserly' or 'stingy'). Or we've heard the (possibly apocryphal) tale of a writer who was informed by his editor that his use of the hunting term 'duck blind' was unacceptable, as the preferred substitute for the latter word is now 'visually impaired.'

How far we should take this linguistic sensitivity to social issues has long been a subject of (often heated) debate. Can female members of the fire department be referred to by the traditional title of 'fireman,' or does true gender equality require that they be identified as 'firewomen'? Is the existence of separate gender words for the same concept itself a form of gender discrimination, requiring us to adopt a neutral term such as 'fireperson' for everyone? Or should we just chuck the whole thing and call everybody 'firefighters'? What one group sees as socially progressive, another group is bound to view as a needless discarding of the familiar and traditional.

Another example of this phenomenon surfaced recently in reference to 'master/slave,' a term commonly used in computing (and related industries) to describe the unidirectional control of one device or process by another. Equipment vendors who do business with Los Angeles County received a message in November 2003 from the county's Internal Services Department (ISD) informing them that "based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County," labeling or describing equipment with the term 'master/slave' is no longer acceptable:

   Subject: IDENTIFICATION OF EQUIPMENT SOLD TO LA COUNTY
   Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 14:21:16 -0800
   From: "Los Angeles County"

   The County of Los Angeles actively promotes and is committed to ensure a work environment that is free from any discriminatory influence be it actual or perceived. As such, it is the County's expectation that our manufacturers, suppliers and contractors make a concentrated effort to ensure that any equipment, supplies or services that are provided to County departments do not possess or portray an image that may be construed as offensive or defamatory in nature.

   One such recent example included the manufacturer's labeling of equipment where the words "Master/Slave" appeared to identify the primary and secondary sources. Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label.

   We would request that each manufacturer, supplier and contractor review, identify and remove/change any identification or labeling of equipment or components thereof that could be interpreted as discriminatory or offensive in nature before such equipment is sold or otherwise provided to any County department.

   Thank you in advance for your cooperation and assistance.

   Joe Sandoval, Division Manager
   Purchasing and Contract Services
   Internal Services Department
   County of Los Angeles


   Note: You are receiving this email because you have registered with the County of Los Angeles. If you do not wish to receive future L.A. County Event news, simply click the link below, and update your registration information to remove email notification.

To verify that this wasn't a hoax or an internal joke which mistakenly escaped to the wider world of the Internet, we called the Purchasing and Contract Services division for the County of Los Angeles, and they informed us that yes, they did issue this message, and yes, it was meant seriously. The representative we spoke with said that someone within the County bureaucracy — a person who probably didn't understand computer terminology — had taken offense at 'master/slave' references and complained to the board, whereupon the Internal Services Department was obligated to issue notification requesting that vendors refrain from using that terminology.

Whether this message reflects more a "socially progressive" change or one of the "needless discarding of the familiar and traditional" variety we couldn't say, but — much to the chagrin of several vendors who passed it along to us — the County of Los Angeles is apparently serious about it.

Last updated:   24 November 2003

It takes a shameless person to even make the move to complain about this stuff.
The person who did is probably racist.


I had a black guy try to argue that the word "Pride" is no longer acceptable for use in the Navy as it is a racist term, WTF?

I take great pride in being niggardly [:D]

They should replace Master/Slave with something completely neutral, like ... Dom/Sub.

From SNOPES:

Here's a fun one:

Or we've heard the (possibly apocryphal) tale of a writer who was informed by his editor that his use of the hunting term [b]'duck blind' was unacceptable,[/b] as the preferred substitute for the latter word is now 'visually impaired.'

California you are a clown.

Ban "master cylinders" from brake systems. For the children.

Well screw them.  From now on I'm going to use master/slave to refer to my hands when shooting.  My left hand will now be known as master since I shoot lefty.

that was my thought before i scrolled down and saw your post.

anyway, +1 on the master cylinder

Damn. I was thinking the exact same thing. [:D]

You should read the comments on this bullshit over at [url]slashdot.org[/url].

Some of them are hysterical and it would seem a lot of geeks (including this one) despise PC as much as we do. [lol]

[url]http://slashdot.org/articles/03/11/25/0014257.shtml?tid=103&tid=133&tid=186&tid=99[/url]

What is going to happen to male and female connectors?

Here is the deal, any word that replaces a "stigmatized" word will eventually retain those stigmas too, and soooooo the PC crowd is just creating MORE WORDS THAT ARE STIGMATIZED.

Instead of kids saying "What are you retarded"
they will now say "What are you mentally handicapped" now there are just more words that are stigmatized. The PC crowd is fucking retarded oops I mean mentally handicapped.

I like that! I'm going to start using that term instead, and now I can say that it was out of political correctness.

There is allready a company in CA that doesnt call them male and female anymore. They call it something like Post and Slot or something. I cant remember but I was in a training class a while back and we had a question so we got the rep on the phone from CA and we kept refering to them as Male and Female and he kept saying no sorry they are not male and female. Everybody in the class thought it was insane to change something like that, that has been around for many many years.

I'm sure the next dose of idiocy will be to ban "Parent/Child" labels (such as in database structures) because it might offend those who regrettably had miscarraiges or those who willfully had their child sucked into a sink prior to birth.

The BIG ONE can't hit LA too soon, IMHO...

Exactly. The words aren't pejorative because of the way they are spelled or pronounced, but because of what they represent. "Retarded person" was a genteel substitute for "moron," "idiot," and "imbecile," each of which was a perfectly respectable word for a person of subnormal intelligence. Best current example: among my 15 yo's associates, "gay" has 2 uses. The first is value-neutral and means "homosexual," as in "Oh, that's my Uncle Fred's boyfriend. They're gay." The second is deliberately (though sometimes playfully) offensive, and while it too means "homosexual," it is connotatively equivalent to "queer" or "faggot" or any of a number of more colorful terms that might come to mind, as in "That's really gay," or "What are you, gay?"

Lots of people on this board can remember when referring to people of African ancestry as "colored" was the mark of a gentleman. If they succeed in replacing "master/slave" with, say "alpha/beta," it will only be a matter of time before "emancipated beta" becomes a derogatory term for black people. The world is full of idiots (in the pejorative, metaphorical sense).

Well, after they bury IDE, SCSI will probably be removed too, as it insinuates (if you have a twisted mind), the homeless.  (cept they don't have ID's)

Is it true DIs and DSs can no longer use the term "swingin' dicks"? [;D]

On a serious note, "master/slave" get used in lots of places besides vending machines.  One area is in semiconductors/computers.  What are the bozos gonna do about that?  "Please stop selling semiconductor chips with master/slave channels/busses/you-name-it in this county."

Actually, I wish they would enforce the letter of the law completely.  It would probably bring the county to a screeching halt.

This from a Slashdot comment on the subject:



Can anyone confirm this?

So, I wonder how they got Seagate and all the other manufacturers from putting "master/slave" on the jumper setting guide that's on the hard drive...unless they expect the vendors to relabel them.  Kinda hard to do for every HD they get from the channel.  

And how do their IT guys communicate to each other how they want the drives jumpered?  

Unbelievable...just when you thought you'd heard everything, here comes Kali AGAIN.  

Maybe all the IT equipment vendors should get together and start charging a $100 per HD relabeling fee to LA county.  Hit the bastards where it hurts.  

All this crap serves to just entrench me more firmly in my outdated views.

Anybody want to buy a pre-ban HDD? [:D]

Buy everything you can, just grab random items.

Someday soon, they too, will be "pre-bans" [:D]

No, but I'll continue, until someone puts a bullet into my head, to speak pre-ban English.

F*ck these PC brutes, all of them, hard and repeatedly.

Point:  The more stupid laws you LET them get away with making, the more stupid laws they will make.

We have to use their twisted logic to our benefit, God forbid one of them calls me a "GUN NUT" I will forcefully remind them that that is not a very politically correct term I would like to be called "A VIGOROUS PATRIOT", or if one of them uses the old adage that I probably own a gun to compensate for a small man hood, I will promptly bring them up on sexual harassment charges for describing my genitals and making me "FEEL" uncomfortable.