Is targeting "ideas rooted in fascism or bigotry" a bad thing?
On the other hand, I don't have a strong attachment at all to naming a branch "master" and can easily rename it without a second thought.
I thought it wasn't a big issue until I saw how hard one side fought to keep the name "master".
After that I changed my mind and name all of my branches main and give a little push to projects I'm part of to do the same.
Plus, words do have power:
Master craftsman? Master mold? Master copy? Head Master... Just because this word was used in relation to slavery doesn't curtail its use in language, removing it only serves to focus its "power".
Also, thats not how language works. At all. It is never how language worked. An Australian and an American are going to have a very different reaction to the word cunt.
Candidly, the erasing of words from language for any reason is very 1984, it's a book you might want to read, its a good primer to understanding how control of language is one of the features of fascism. You should probably read up on how linguistic purity was part and parcel of Italian and to a lesser degree German control of the people.
Except none of those examples are relevant comparisons. It's well documented that the reason the default branch name was master traces back to Bitkeeper, which was using the master/slave nomenclature.
> Also, thats not how language works. At all. It is never how language worked. An Australian and an American are going to have a very different reaction to the word cunt.
Master and slave have universal meaning across all English dialects.
If you're going to make an argument against this change on the basis of semantics, at least get your facts right.