Twitter adjusts its language

One of the reactions to the Black Lives Matter movement is a desire to clean up the hidden and taken-for-granted racism in our language.  Twitter has announced that it will change its house style to remove master and slave from its texts. The master/slave terminology in this case is IT jargon and refers to a computer which controls other peripheral devices which cannot function on their own but only respond to the commands given by the controlling computer.  It has been accepted and common IT terminology for decades but Twitter wants to replace it with leader/follower.  Apparently Twitter is not alone. Some large American corporations are following suit.

 It is worth noting that the master-slave relationship is in this technical use an abstract concept not limited to the particular historical reality of US slavery, or slavery in any other country, and that the terminology is in way to be seen as an endorsement of slavery. The idea of unlimited control inherent in master-slave is critical to the use of these terms in the IT context, and is not at all captured in the proposed alternatives.

 Similarly but less obviously the terms blacklist and whitelist are deemed offensive and will be replaced by denylistand allowlist.  Again this is done in an IT context where some emails are refused admission while others are granted admission.  This seems to be a less reasonable change in that black as an adjective meaning ‘objectionable or undesirable’ has nothing to do with black people and dates back to the 1600s.  It has given rise to expressions like in someone’s black books and to earn a black mark.  The form whitelist is more recent but is a simple opposition of white to black.  It may be possible for Twitter to change it in a limited IT context but I doubt that that will have any effect on the general use of blacklist.  It is reminiscent of the attempts to change manufacture into personfacture just because the letters man appeared at the start of the word. The initial manu- came from the Latin manus hand.

 Language engineering is difficult but can be worthwhile as the feminist movement of the 1980s showed.  But it is best to target words which are clearly problematic, and not to overreach, making demands for change which can appear in context to be ridiculous.